“Hey Buddy, my eyes are up here.” When I wore this shirt every body stared at my chest. I like images of women and beer so I like beer shirts with women on them, but this one is too much for me. I don’t have enough personality to overcome this shirt. I prefer the classics, such as the turn of the century Olympia Beer ads that Olympia brought back in the 1970s. I remember my Grandma Lydia painted portraits of women in fancy hats that she had hanging in every room of her house. That feeling of nostalgia is probably why Olympia was my favorite beer back in the days of the cheap 12-pack.

(When Suicide Girls first became popular I read a magazine interview that asked the founder if she had pioneered a new style of sexuality for the next generation of young women, she answered that it was already there (paraphrasing) “ before we were around Taste of Latex and The Probe were featuring sexy images of punk and alternative looking girls…”  Even back then, it was just nice that the Probe was remembered.
Like Nirvana to hair metal I thought Suicide Girls were a nice response to the Bud Girl posters and all of that horribly slick sexuality that we were fed in the ‘80s, but now here I am wearing a t-shirt of a big boobed beach girl making an “O” face and feeling nostalgia for women in fancy hats.
I’m confused sexually. I can’t decide which type of hetero normative male I want to be.)

Classic, I really like this one, and it’s their best beer, this is on the back

Nostalgia is also the reason so many adults love Disneyland. (Yes, that was an attempt at a segue. Don’t judge me, I’m a drinker, not a writer!) I went to Disneyland for one day when I was 12 and I only remember standing in line. I’m not one of those adults who likes to spend vacations at Disneyland.
However, when our kids were young the wife thought they should have the full Disneyland experience. She was right. Not only did they love it while we were there but they seemed happier when we got home too. They were on a Disney high. Then three years ago, we went back and did a full on Disney boot camp. 3 days, fast pass strategies and 15 hours each day in the park. It was an incredibly well executed family vacation. It was tough for me to find time for breweries, but I managed.

Don’t bother, but this is the old Disney post http://www.brewznewz.com/2013/04/

This time I never set foot in Disneyland. The wife and kids left early every morning and I stayed behind in the hotel room. I brought about six books to read while I was waiting for the breweries to open. However, it’s now 2016 and I recently jumped from an I-phone four to one of those big I-phone sixes, quite a life change. I did very little book reading. No TV either. I spent time on instagram.

I almost want to join Facebook now because that’s where all of my fellow old people are. I don’t come across a lot of people my age on instagram. Then, just because I follow and “like” Miley Cyrus I get Selena Gomez and Justin Timberlake in my “explore” feed. That’s like getting Iron Butterfly when you’re looking for Led Zeppelin or Screw 32 instead of Hickey. For that reason and others my favorite exploring options on instagram are comments and location. It’s pretty amazing. Those are the paths you follow when you want to get off the beaten path and find the real stuff from all around the world. I complain about people who don’t add location or they make comments, but have private feeds. I was bitching about this one day to the wife, saying people that have private feeds are fearful of the world and don’t have a sense of community. She said, “What are saying? My account is private!” I didn’t know. To her Instagram is a way to keep up with friends and family. I’m a little more intense about it.

Is Hitler trending?
Last month I noticed photos of Hitler come up in feeds. It was always in a foreign language so I wasn’t sure of the context, but it was still weird because it seemed completely random. There were four or five different times where I came across photos of Hitler. It was odd.
One time I thought I might have stumbled on some strange Nazi cult, but I clicked all the people that “liked” the Hitler photos (no hash tags on them) and I didn’t find any other Nazi stuff. Just random “likes” for Hitler from people otherwise unassociated.

This guy got six likes for his selfie, Hitler got 3 likes, Che got one like and the others got none.

Nazis, Don’t Call it Comeback!
While the family was at Disneyland a friend posted a flyer on instagram. It was a counter-protest for a Nazi rally in Sacramento. It sounded like an event straight out of a bad movie so I made a couple of sarcastic comments under the photo. “I hope they have pamphlets.” Are Nazi’s a thing in California? Were they ever in this country? References to Nazis in America are usually used solely as punch lines or insults. However, I quickly discovered on instagram that in other parts of the world Hitler seems almost beloved. It’s not just in one location, many different parts of the world. It’s all walks of life too, young kids in punk bands, moms, soldiers, doctors, and classical musicians. I looked up the reasons for this and there are many different factors that vary by location, including the influence of WWII alliances and expiration of the Bavarian copyright for Mein Kamph that has lead to a surge in the sales of his book.
I’ll post a few screen captures. I think I’ll make them thumb post size (at the end) so I don’t have an entire Brewz Newz filled with Hitler love, but if you are curious you can click on them What strikes me most are the nature of the few comments that are in English. There isn’t a negative social stigma for Hitler in most nonwestern countries. The attitude towards him is completely different than we’re used to. Kids often aren’t taught about the Holocaust in Iran. (see post at right)
It’s not everywhere; I’ve looked at several thousands of photos in Pakistan and Afghanistan and didn’t find any Hitler at all. I’m also not educated enough to know why it was possible to find real women with Instagram accounts in Afghanistan but not in Pakistan. Pakistan was a lot of dudes following other dudes and they all have short beards and longish hair. I kept trying to use the location key to escape into different social strata, but got caught in a giant vortex of semi- hairy dudes selfies. Very few women and most were completely covered. 3am, sleepless, and the worst hour I have ever spent on instagram. Pakistan, get you’re shit together!

I thought maybe it was just bad luck within a small sample size but I just now tried again, 183 million people and this times a thousand is pretty much all I can come up with on instagram in Pakistan.

(The day after I wrote this a popular Pakistani woman was strangled by her brother for making somewhat risqué posts on Facebook, an honor killing. This one made the news because of her large following. Over 500 women are killed every year in Pakistan by family members, some of them are killed for photos on social media and most honor killings are never prosecuted – so that explains why Instagram in Pakistan is nothing but miles and miles of little hairy dudes.)

Other Arabic countries have instagram feeds that are completely lawless, car stunts on public highways, bizarre dancing men in the desert, and the most disturbing video I’ve ever seen in my life. Normally I look away before I see horrible things, but I didn’t see this one coming. I wrote a paragraph about it but decided to delete it. I can’t even mention what it was and keep this light hearted. If you want to be disturbed you can ask me in person but I won’t write about it.

And now back to Disneyland!
So before I got side tracked by Hitler, this was to be a Disneyland beer post. Unfortunately I did something really dumb in preparation for this trip and I stopped drinking for four days. My intention was to clear out my liver in preparation for a brewery blitzkrieg, but instead of going to the beer fridge all I did was satiate my cravings by raiding my kids’ cereal cabinet and then later scooping myself ice cream at one in the morning while binge watching YouTube. Not drinking is so unhealthy! I felt horrible and was looking forward to clearing out my system with a good dose of pure hops n’ barley.
Mistake #2 was meeting up with old friends the very first night of our trip. I over drank before I even got to any breweries, that’s what you do with old friends! Luckily, the hotel we were in the first night had a weight room. The next morning, after dropping the family off at Universal Studios (an addition to this trip because of Harry Potter land) I went to the weight room and spent an hour kicking myself in the butt. It worked! I was ready to start drinking again by noon!

Of course I wanted this calendar but they were sold out!

WAZE
My first attempt at using the waze app went well except waze doesn’t mention the address. It just says, “you’ve arrived” so instead of walking into the Eagle Rock Brewery I walked to the Eagle Rock Church. A lady there lightheartedly condescended to me drinking instead of church going but she pointed me in the right direction. A friend Josh joined me by way of Uber and we went on to the Highland Park Brewery next, both great. After that we headed to Hollywood where things are weird. I took several photos for instagram and deleted them within an hour. That’s my idea of living in the moment. One was a photo of a little house behind another house where Josh told me David Yow lives. In honor of that moment, here is a YouTube clip of the great Jesus Lizard!

After David Yow’s place Josh and I picked up his special lady friend Donna. (Previously known as Good Donna) A nice thing about  LA is that you don’t have to get on Instagram to leave the country. We went to a Korea Town shopping plaza, none of the signs were in English, but in the corner of the place was a great beer bar. They didn’t have the Adam Carolla “Endless Rant” IPA but they had a different beer from King Harbor Brewing so I got that one in honor of them honoring Adam Corolla.

This year Father’s Day happened during this vacation. We went a couple of miles down the road from Disneyland to Oggi’s Pizza and Brewery. I actually saw the family each day. It was in the middle of *100 plus heat wave so  they’d come back to the hotel around 2pm and I’d go to the hotel pool with Henry while the women took an air conditioning break. Then they went back to the park and I hit the breweries that opened at 4pm. Backstreet Brewing had a $3 pint Monday that worked out for me. That was my first time using the Uber app too. I had walked there because it was only two miles from the hotel room, but I had to go around a highway

Featured Beer; King Harbor’s Endless Rant. I’ve been following Nicole Ernie on twitter for a couple of years now. She’s not a fan of the Ace Man, but she is a Master Cicerone (beer expert); I think I heard on the Brewing Network that she’s the youngest person ever to earn that title. I could be wrong about that, but if I’m wrong I’m still close to the truth. Anyway, I brought a bottle of “Endless Rant” to Fern and Greg’s wedding. I chased down Nicole and asked her what she thought about this very special beer honoring the great Adam Carolla. I didn’t have a note pad, but she said something like, “I didn’t want to like this but it’s good.” A few hours later she completely killed it with Judas Priest on the Karaoke!

and stuff (I hash tagged #dalebozzio at the brewery but I don’t know if anyone got it. The wife didn’t even click on it. = Missing Persons = “Walking in LA”) so instead of walking back to the hotel I clicked on the Uber app and it said, “your ride will be here in 4 minutes.” Amazingly easy, I’ve never called a cab in my life, but now I use Uber.
I want to thank Bootlegger’s Brewery for opening at noon on a Monday and I’d say I had the most fun at Legends Brewery, but otherwise I’m not going to review each brewery like I did last time. I will say that brewery culture is still strong! Each place had it’s own personality and I didn’t have any bad experiences. Except for some reason the new Instagram app couldn’t “add location” at half the breweries I visited. Google Earth and Uber always knew exactly where I was, but Instagram couldn’t figure it out. That annoyed me because I was trying to be ninja quick with my posts and get back to drinking and it’s the difference between posting a photo that says, “Hey, check this place out!” to “Hey, look I’m having a beer!” And that’s great, but it’s a little different. When the location works it’s like sending extra photos to anyone who might be interested. It’s just good shorthand. There are still hash-tags, but those are overused and abused.

The “Art on our Walls” segment for this post was the Olympia Beer Plate up at the top of the column.

Getting back to America, it looks like I will be watching The Voice this year. Previously the only reality TV show I’ve watched were the four episodes of Celebrity Apprentice that Adam Carolla was on. Adam’s natural deference was interpreted by Trump as bad tactics. The behind the scenes stories on Adam’s podcast were more interesting than the show itself. After he was fired I stopped watching. Miley Cyrus became a coach for a short stint on The Voice last season. It was impressive to watch her so quickly breakdown songs and coach up the performances. As Pharrell said on set, “she’s like a little super human!” This year she’s coming back for a full season as a judge. I’m not sure what that entails, but Miley never disappoints. https://youtu.be/DYIp5JAJrSo

Main Street Brewery isn’t afraid to have fun, take that hipsters!

Good one Murray!

While I was writing this. This one was back to back with the Murray photo in my regular feed!

It’s not all about Hitler and honor killings. Turkey seemed to be fairly joyful.

When I was teenager I once put my records outside because I was afraid they were evil. I didn’t want to sleep in the same room with them. I had attended a nighttime church event. The listing I saw in the paper had said, “learn the truth about rock n’ roll!” or something. I went to it because it had listed Led Zeppelin and ACDC. However, when I got there I was surprised to see that I was the only mullet headed rocker in attendance. All of the other young people were there with their parents. The presentation scared the hell out of me! The minister that prayed with me afterwards seemed to feel bad about it. Instead of putting the fear of God into me he tried to talk me down.
The following week I spent a lot of time playing my records backwards (turntable in neutral, turn by hand) and asking around about the occult. The following Sunday I put on my white pants and my most colorful button up shirt and went to the same church above HWY 680 in San Ramon. It was a mistake, not my tribe. I was trying to fit in, but they tried to pretend I wasn’t there.

“An American Pale Ale designed by Michael Wilton, the lead guitarist of the band Queensryche” Even with my mullet I was never a full blown metal guy. I’m giving my other one of these to Todd McNeill.

I didn’t feel dumb about it. I slowly came to peace with Led Zeppelin. I was never fully convinced they were satanic, but the music definitely had a lot of power over me. It seemed supernatural and I was concerned.
A few weeks later I went to my first ACDC concert. I went alone. I was sober and sat quietly in the nosebleed seats. Afterwards my ears kept ringing for days. They never stopped ringing. After about a year I got used to it.

The Gilman Zinefest 

Fieldwork Brewing is just two blocks away from 924 Gilman, if it wasn’t for that I probably wouldn’t have gone to this event. Even when I published a zine I never felt comfortable at zine fests. It always feels awkward to thumb through somebody’s life work right in front of them especially if you don’t feel like the target audience. I just went straight to the few things I knew I wanted and bought those. It was a zine fest fail on my part. The wife and I both heard about The Spitboy Rule book written by their drummer, Michelle Cruz Gonzalez. As someone who read every issue of MRR from 1989 to 1999 I remember Spitboy. I didn’t have their records, but I had traded zines through the mail with their singer Adrianne Droogas and I mentioned to the wife that I was sort of hoping she might be there. The reason being I always had this weird satisfaction that the singer of such a quintessentially city oriented hardcore band was from my suburban hometown of Pleasanton.

Probe #1

Commuting to the Punk Rock.
In 1989 I appreciated the aesthetic of punk rock, but I knew it wasn’t me and if I had tried to fit in it would have been much more lame than the mullet on my head. I was the suburbs walking. Once at an intimate show at Brave New World in SF, everybody was dressed to the nines in their finest anti-establishment garb. I stuck out in my polo shirt and white tennis shoes so I nodded to people and said matter of factly, “I’m really cool.” It got a few laughs so that became my shtick for a while.
Ironically, the only time I was ever harassed at Gilman was soon after I chopped off the mullet. My zine partner and I went to see The Muffs. The girl taking money at the door scowled angrily at me the entire time. I noticed, but didn’t think it was about me. Later on I saw that she had written “GO HOME!!” on my Gilman card. Maybe she didn’t like my shoes.
East Bay punks seemed too serious about punk rock. They could have been easy to make fun of with all of their rules, and the uniform, combat boots, colored hair etc. but it was genuine. It was identification with a scene. SF was different, more varied, fun garage punk at Purple Onion, Epicenter was hardcore but clean and friendly, and then a large dirtier, more drug oriented, more fucked up, but also more intellectual Mission scene that I eventually gravitated towards.

My old zine partner Rich has been producing a burlesque show in Vegas for the past three years!

In the process of writing this I googled his name and this time actually I found him! He had been missing for years so it was good to see he is alive and well and looks the same! However, finding Rich completely sidetracked this post as I broke out my old issues of Probe. Before that I was concentrating on the city/suburbs relationship and I had a race theme going thanks to reading the Spitboy Rule book. 
When I met Rich 26 years ago we were both wearing the same L7 “Smell the Magic” t-shirt. L7 weren’t really a “girl band” as the term is usually applied. Their sex was a heavy influence, but their main intention was to ROCK. I really loved L7. As a matter of fact, I loved L7 so much that I was afraid of them. I was supposed to do the interview with Rich the night we saw them at the Berkeley Square, but I knew that if I were to get personally snubbed it would have made me heartsick. A simple eye roll from Donita or Jennifer would have frozen me speechless. I chickened out and Rich did that interview solo.
With the Melvins and Mr. Bungle I wasn’t nervous because they were dudes.

Riot Girls were Late to the party
As far as girls in bands go, dumb grunge rock was much more progressive than the hardcore punks or riot girl which came later on. From 1989-1991, there was an all girl band or a girl fronted band playing at most shows. However, my memory of this may be skewed because I was friends with Rich. He seemed to prefer the girl bands. I remember giving him a hard time “You just buy every record that has girls in it don’t you?”
Truth is Rich was the real deal. When I met him he was already a show veteran, and like me, a loner. We would just go to whatever show looked interesting whether we were with friends or not – actually Rich never had friends. Rich always had his camera. That was his thing. One night I did see The Fastbacks from Seattle walk over to the table where Rich was sitting just to say Hi. I asked him how they knew him. He said he had been to all of their Bay Area shows so they remembered him. I think they used one of his photos on a record of theirs.
However, the sad part of the story is that Rich was 23 and he had never been with a girl. He didn’t drink or do drugs. He was confident, but quietly so. His personality didn’t match his size. He was overweight and had a little problem with acne. Those were his issues. I can’t remember his race ever coming up.
Then again, maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe the narrative that ran in Rich’s head was that he didn’t have a girlfriend because he was a Mexican who moved into a white town. Maybe Mexican stuff happened to him all the time and I didn’t know it.
So after making contact and finding out what he was up to I sent him a few fact checking emails for this post.
He didn’t respond to my race questions. He said the stuff I brought up was “so remote” from where he is now he didn’t have any thing to say about it except that he looked forward to reading this.
My personal impression at the time was that he left the punk scene because women in bands had taken his heart out of it.
After his L7 interview in Probe #1 Rich sent the band a copy. Donita actually called to thank him for doing it, which was amazingly cool of her. However, after that L7 signed to a major label with Nirvana’s producer so the next Bay Area show was not so intimate. It was a much bigger venue and the place was packed. Rich was up front taking photos as usual when Donita said, “Can we get the fucking photographers out of the front row so people can see!” Rich was dejected. I said, “She didn’t mean you.” He said, “She was looking right at me when she said that!” (I’m guessing she was upset that smaller girls were getting crowded out, in the same way Kathleen Hanna asked guys to go to the back.)
The next thing that happened was that Rich tried to interview the Lunachicks and they were just unnecessarily nasty to him. We made a joke out of it in Probe #2 but Rich took that hard. Rich was a comic book, schlock movie type of guy so the whole Lunachicks scene was right up his ally. He had every single one of their crappy records. Soon after that he moved to Concord to be closer to his $9 hour job drilling holes in bowling balls (He never liked it when I described his job that way, he did customer services at a bowling shop.) When I went to visit him I was surprised at how adult his new apartment looked. The whole record collecting geek vibe was gone. I also stopped seeing him at shows.
In his recent email response to me Rich said, “I have been living in Vegas since ’99, after a short time in Seattle. I’ve been doing IT work for the local health dept. for about 16 years, and loving it.” And he said “Burlesque is a blast. I put on the best shows that you can find outside of a casino.”

The Turbonegro related “art on our wall” segment for this post is not nearly as interesting as this awesome instagram post from Good Donna. Three of my favorite things on one patch! Rich Hosey mentioned that Turbonegro is one of the few bands he will still travel to see. Then I found on the Jennifer Finch Wikipedia page that she is “an active member of Turbojugend, a fan club of the Norwegian rock band Turbonegro.” Since this is the race blog… am I the only person that remembers Turbonegro in blackface? It was short lived. I received a promo photo that was in blackface around ’93 or ’94. I think all references to it have been wiped off the Internet because I couldn’t find anything. It might have also been part of the reason they went through a name change during the time they were on a Probe Records comp. Shortly after that they switched to the denim/sailor theme and used their original name. They’re another band I’ve lost track of. They are bigger than ever today but I haven’t been aware of them in a while. Part of the reason might be that shortly after we were married the wife played so much Turbonegro that I eventually got tired of hearing them! As she put on “Apocalypse Dudes” for the 300th time I thought. “Well, at least I married a woman who loves Turbonegro!”

Spitboy Rule
I liked the book because it includes stories about a scene that I was a part of but from a different vantage point. Each story was somewhat anticlimactic which I appreciate in the same way that I like French movies because they just end when the story is over. I liked the attention to the dividing line between the suburbs and the city, because that’s how I viewed the scene at the time. Her views of being a woman in the hardcore scene were positive as well as her thoughts on the men in the scene. The only chapters where she seemed to have some bitterness or lingering issues had to do with her “brown skin.” Not so much experiences of racism but of not having her ethnicity acknowledged. She blamed herself for not emphasizing her ethnic identity and went as far as to say that only dating white guys may have been a form of self-hatred.

In the French version the wife walks away from her husband as the credits role. The American version of the same movie was actually better, but then it couldn’t end until someone got stabbed and went flying out of a window. Dumb!

The story about inviting her band into her Grandma’s house and the racial explanation of what happened there didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I wanted to hear the other side of that story. I think the author may have externalized what was going on in her own head. I can’t imagine, living in California, that Latino culture and class differences could have been that foreign to her band-mates, even if they came from the suburbs.
I suppose it’s possible to stay isolated, but not very likely. Ultimately your job matters more than where you come from. You interact with co-workers everyday. Sometimes you don’t even talk to your neighbors.

At the age of 21 my brother vowed to never be with another white girl again. 25 years later he’s been true to his word.

That does remind me. Racism does exist, but most of the stuff that gets called out as being racist is pretty ridiculous or overblown.
However, I did have my own “Holy fuck that’s racist!” moment. I was watching the movie “Boyhood” and I literally stood up, pointed at the TV, “Did she really just say that? That’s not a joke?” Then it only got worse the next scene. At this point Boyhood was nominated for movie of the year and I never heard anything about the blatant racism. I heard fawning interviews and reviews on NPR, Slate, and even the Dailey Show so I was little stunned. (Those are the same shows that will have 20-minute discussions on Miley Cyrus and her appropriation of black culture.) I think the reason I may have noticed it is because, before my current job, I spent about 7 years with mostly Mexican co-workers and the last year before my present job most of my accounts were bought by a Mexican family business. The guy portrayed in the movie I related to as “the boss” not a poor migrant laborer. Yeah, his parents worked 12 hours a day their entire lives to build the family business and make a better life for him, but thankfully some lady at the job site told him he was smart and turned his life around! The scene was so condescending the cringe factor was off the charts. There is a giant difference between first and second-generation immigrants. The wage and education gap with whites is completely wiped out within a generation. The man running a four-man crew and doing your estimate won’t be inspired by platitudes. Dumb!

Instagram post, Miley’s mom attaches dreads to her daughter’s hair

I started writing stories about race but it is too rich and lengthy a topic. I have a story about going to an Easy E show in Oakland back in the late ‘80s (nothing like the movie), some dumb skinhead stories, a race update for Pleasanton, and while living in San Leandro I placed a classified ad in the paper hoping to meet local black women that led to the most uncomfortable cup of coffee in my life – but I’ll save those stories for another time. For now I’ll just include a couple of anticlimactic stories about my ambiguously brown friends.
Like the time we were at the Drake’s warehouse and I convinced my completely non-punk friend Ernie that we should head over to a show at Gilman. He actually said as we rolled up, “there’s not going to be any skinheads here or anything?” I laughed it off and told him it was nothing like that and then on queue someone in a passing car shouted “WHITE POWER!!” at us. I said, “I swear that never happens!” Then I realized I wouldn’t know that first hand.
On the other hand, when I drove an old Buick there was a 3 month stretch where I was pulled over four different times without cause, and each time could be a story. Once I pulled up in front of my own house and I did the thing where I was waiting for the song to end before I turned off the radio. Suddenly the cop spotlight went on behind me and as I started to explain I was at home my car door was slammed. She didn’t pull her gun, but put her hand on it and yelled at me to keep my hands up. She called for back-up. As with the previous stop they wanted to search the vehicle and I politely declined, repeatedly. It was a full 20 minutes before they let me out of my car. She thought my behavior was suspicious. If I were black I would have thought that was some racist shit.

Featured Brewery: Brewz Newz Filipino correspondent Kortnee just posted this photo of Ted, the Vice President of the Sacramento wing of the Brewz Newz Brewery Clan.
Fieldwork Brewing was started by the brewer at Ballast Point who created the Sculpin Grapefruit IPA. However, he’s more of a beer purist and not actually happy about the trend towards flavored beers that he helped spawn.
Another thing about Fieldwork Brewing is that they have a large brewing facility and a reputation that makes them one of the most common beers to find in any Bay Area taproom. It seems to me their business plan is to pump out a wide variety of beer and by not bottling they never have to wait for the government to approve each new style that they brew. They just put the required information on the keg ring and move onto the next creation.
McKay’s Taphouse near my home is always tweeting that they have something brand new of theirs. At the same time, Murray Bowles in San Jose will post Fieldwork beers on his instagram that are completely different. You’d have to move fast to try them all.

L7’s major label debut was a  disappointment, it was bland, nothing like the fun live show, and after that the band slowly left my consciousness. In researching for this post I found out that L7 reformed for a world tour in 2015. Something I was completely unaware of. Then I found Jennifer Finch’s blog. I haven’t had time to read through all of it, but she had a debilitating disease starting in 2008 and then was diagnosed with cancer in 2012. Her instagram page is awesome, a cancer surviving 49 year olds topless selfies are the kind of rock star POWER MOVE that I greatly appreciate!

It’s on a bigger stage than when I saw them but this is the video that reminded me the most of what L7 shows were like.

When my generation was young everything was a constant rush and we could barely contain ourselves, beer was any 12 pack and food and sleep were never even a consideration in the constant chase of the next rush. Music was an ever present high, throwing giant house parties, going to shows, meeting new people everyday and going to strange places was stimulating and exciting, sex was a constant rush, music and the people we knew seemed so much more important. However, it was the need for chaos that we were attracted to.
Today’s teens seem to be a little different. The entire world is already laid out in front of them. They don’t need to travel to the city, action is everywhere and it bothers them. They seem so much more mature than we were. I was talking to another dad about how well behaved the high school kids in our neighborhood are. On a Friday in the park, instead of listening to metal or getting drunk in the bushes like we used to do, they are running around the park, doing cartwheels through the sprinklers, and they are all so super nice to us old folks that it’s almost disconcerting. The other dad said to me, “That’s because they are all high on pills!”

The executive vice president at Apple who changed my life forever

When I was in college a guy named Hiroki Asai brought some records over to my dorm room. Come to think of it I think he also gave me my first Charles Bukowski book so this guy really changed my life. The record I remember the most was Sewer Trout “Songs About Drinking” it came with a comic zine that I thought was fantastic. It introduced me to a new type of attitude and humor that I had never seen before. There was also the Yeastie Girlz “ovary action” 7” that I loved, some Black Flag records, and my new theme song “Alcohol” by Gang Green. Drinking beer back then was the epitome of fun but at age 21 the idea that someone would rather drink than fuck was so absurd to me that it made this song hilarious!

In 1989, when I started going to shows, I had a big fluffy mullet! I was a happy suburban douchebag when I crossed over into the punk rock world.

The “art on my wall” segment for this post is the blank spot on the wall in my garage where the show poster that Kurt Cobain gave me used to hang. It’s been missing for about 12 years now. I got it after a show at Bogart’s in Long Beach I saw a small pile of screen prints sitting next to the drums. At that point Mr. Cobain was done playing and was kneeling at the edge of the stage. I said, “Hey, are you selling those posters?” He got up and walked over to investigate, picked one up and brought it back to me. When I asked how much he smiled lazily and waved me off. It should have a been a nice moment that ended there but I said, “Oh, can I get one for my roommate too?” He rolled his eyes at me and shuffled back over to get another. I could tell he was a little annoyed so I said, “How much for this one?” He shrugged and said “a buck?” and I gave him dollar. Hopefully Todd still has his poster. When we first moved into this house my roommate Craig converted our garage into a recording studio and quite a number of bands came through. After Craig cleared out his studio I cleaned out the garage top to bottom and painted all of the walls. I probably just misplaced it at some point. Hopefully I didn’t throw it out by accident.

The mullet photo at the top was taken in 1990 when I was 23. I’m glad the photo exists because my shirt is off and you can see I was ripped. If that photo didn’t exist I wouldn’t even bother telling this story. Several years ago the wife didn’t believe me when I told her that as a sophomore in high school I could grab a basketball rim. She tried to explain that it must have been a low hoop or something. I got indignant, “No! I could do it on any court, all the time!! I could stand directly under the basket, jump up and grab the rim!” She had met me in my 30s after I had five summers of truck driving over my belt so I forgive her for doubting me. I’m only 5’ 10” but at one time I had monkey strength!
I never played sports in high school because my grades were too low. The football coach tried to get me on the team, talked with my math teacher so I could start going to practice, but then I failed other classes too. What I really loved was baseball though, I would watch practice everyday after school even though I couldn’t play. After a few weeks the baseball coach, who was also the school custodian, made me “team manager” so I could travel with the team. The last game of the season he gave me an injured players uniform and sent me up to pinch hit. I was walked on four pitches.

My introduction to punk was backwards. Normally it’s the story of the smart and quirky cool kid that was picked on by the dumb jocks. I was never picked on by anybody, nobody thought I was cool, and I wasn’t smart enough to hang out with the jocks.
Earlier this post I referred to myself as “douchebag” which initially I thought might be a little harsh. However, last night I looked at an old 1988 VHS videotape of Hiroki and I at a big party – and I was a douchebag. I wasn’t a jerk or anything but I was annoying and Hiroki was witty and likable. No surprises as to which one of us went on to run the world.

Beer marches on. 9 years ago the wife and I took a trip to the 21st Amendment Brewery in SF. We were on our way to a Bar Feeders show, but we stopped there specifically because they had collaborated with another brewery to brew an Imperial Red, my favorite, and at the time Imperial Reds were actually hard to find. Of course, when we got there they were out of it but we went to the upstairs bar. We had a bartender to ourselves who started handing us tasters as we came in. The wife prefers the dark beer so he suggested a new beer called Back in Black, which I appreciated for the ACDC reference. I had some fancy beers in a tulip glass. It was a really swell time. Then we went to the show and I had to elbow my way to the bar. The band was great but then we stood in a circle and talked to friends we hadn’t seen in a while and I couldn’t hear a thing anybody said. So that may have been when I started preferring breweries to shows though we’ve gone to a few shows lately too. I still like the small ones, especially if they start early, just not the big reunion gigs. Anyway, now 21st Amendment has a giant brewing and canning facility in the suburbs of San Leandro.

Get OFF MY LAWN!
The other day I was clicking around YouTube and under “suggested channels” I got really excited because I saw “Fueled By Ramen” I thought Devon Morf of All You Can Eat had his own channel! Turns out it’s a band called 21 Pilots, I already knew of them because I have a 14 year old daughter that I share an I-tunes account with. They are not Devon Morf, but it’s good stuff.

I was in Good Karma Artisan Ales before a Total Badass, Party Force show in San Jose. The guy behind the bar was playing some sort of African blues retro bla punk bla or something. I wondered if Miley’s veganry got her any fucking respect in the vegan community. I asked him if they ever played any Miley Cyrus. He looked at me like I had just stabbed a cat. Then out of thin air he doubted that she was really a vegan.

Most of the time that people post show photos or band mentions on instagram I try to look them up on YouTube or bandcamp. Even if I came across the next Nirvana or Hickey I wouldn’t know it. I’ve been going though a weird thing with music. I had a Laughing Hyenas “Life Of Crime” and a Charles Bronson CD in my car. I thought, “Why did I used to love this stuff?” I couldn’t relate at all. I thought maybe with my hearing loss it just sounded different. The only music I really listen to anymore is Pipsqueak “Fowl Hymns” and Miley Cyrus. Then a few weeks ago the feeling for the old stuff came back to me again. Those CDs in my car sound great. However, for the most part I want to stick with my new daytime oriented lifestyle, especially in San Jose where everything gets turned up to 11.

I’m posting this first, but it’s actually part 2 of a longer post. I’m in the middle of a second book about punk rock in the early ‘90s and the nostalgia in my head became too unwieldy to contain in just one post.