Urinals, Puke and Me

Well folks, while going through old shit, I found the lyrics to WAR PIG. Lyrics I wrote for musical notes that were strung together by a friend of mine back in the nineteen eighties and still my friend to this day, Terry Bestilney. So, with that for an introduction, I would like to tell you a story.

Sometime ago towards the end of the last century I was involved in a musical project. I would called it "a band" but that would be overly generous. "Musical project" is a much fairer view as my main goal was to make a statement about music which is why calling this thing "a band" would be misleading.

"Oh sure" you're thinking, "all bands are a statement, what was so amazingly different about your Musical Project?" as you then roll your eyes. Well, that's the difference. As you thought, those 'things', unlike my project, were bands. An intentional attempt that was, in the minds of the people referred to by the public as musicians, to create "a band". A band's purpose is to put forth a structured set of performances that would, when deciphered by a human brain from its auditory presentation, could be classified as music.

Myself and my partners in this artistic crime, attempted an "auditory presentation", at least one I hoped, had no right in a world created by a sane and rational god of calling itself "music". The very idea would show more hubris than Icarus's flight, the Beatles claim to be more popular than Jesus or Donald Trump's claim to be America's best President in the last one hundred years (everyone knows it was Richard Nixon).

If at this point you are feeling confused, perhaps I should explain all that led up to the lyrics of "War Pig".

By the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, punk rock was finally transcending into the walking corpse it was destined to be long before Iggy Pop and the Ramones began being heard in prime time television ads or the Battered Wives had to change their name to the Wives so as not to offend feminists. And as with all things zombie related, punk had developed a following of nihilistic cynics with a penchant for self destruction as evidenced by Ian Curtis, Sid Vicious, G.G. Allen and far too many others, famous or not.

A decade later, was there really any other way someone like Kurt Cobain could claim any “punk rock cred” without placing a shotgun in his mouth? With the way the genre was headed, perhaps he saw the probable future for artists like himself. Sixty year old, leather clad, tattoo sporting lounge lizards singing punks greatest hits in a Las Vegas side stage surrounded by potted ferns and equally old slags taking a break from the nickle slots. A fate that might make the business end of a shotgun look very attractive. A fate perhaps better left to Chad Kroeger, whose very band's name would be part of the drunken war cry of the self same geriatric sluts as they howled at their now empty bank accounts.

With such darkness surrounding this near comic book look at reality it was only a matter of time before the hipsters latched on to this musically animated corpse. Of course, they all called themselves “punks” which didn't add to any confusion but certainly to near level four schizophrenic bouts of delusion.

At a house party sometime in late nineteen eighty-four, I and my room mates threw years ago at the NO HOUSE, SNFU showed up after returning home from cutting their first album and gave an impromptu performance. I sarcastically remarked how ironic it was that Kenny, the Belke Boys, Evan and Jimmy would get their artistic break at this moment as punk was finally in its death throes.

At this one of these unknowing hipsters said to me, “How can you say that Fraser? Punk's not dead. Look at all the people around you.”. Which I did but not for any reason such as to see the vibrancy of punk rock. I looked around mainly because I and my room mates had purchased a keg of drought beer and anyone drinking from it without a an “X” marked beer cup was cutting into our profits. “This place is packed,” of course this was a house party, but my guest with typical hipster punk sensibilities failed to consider this, “With all these people here, how can you say “punk is dead”? When did punk die?”

I quickly glanced at his cup to make sure it was sporting an “X”, then met his eye and answered, “As soon as you bought a leather jacket and spiked up your hair Paul.”

At the whim of a gracious God it would have ended there but SNFU had something rare as it happened. SNFU had talent, oodles of it. So much in fact that the band itself could not contain the dark, corpse animating energy they were generating. Edmonton had, before SNFU's album “And No One Else Wanted To Play” even hit the stores to leave its mark on the genre, become host to some of the best and most vibrant music Edmontonians would ever hear. With bands like Government of God, Down Syndrome, Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm, Ghost Shirt Society and many more, the dead continued to rise from the grave. It was powerful enough to inspire a truly plains western creation, lapped up and honed by other Edmonton musicians.

Cow-Punk began taking root. A young Mike McDonald would graduate from playing in five different existing punk and alternative bands at the same time, to creating one of the most nationally under appreciated bands of Western Canada, Jr. Gone Wild. Kathy Dawn and bunch of like minded musicians dragged out the shade of Patsy Kline and Kathy, stealing the moves and the stage floor worming of Mr. Chi-Pig, SNFU's lead singer, would birth local sensation KD Lang and the Reclines. From there she would move onto greater renown before that final bullet was shot into the zombie's skull, ending the abomination against nature and clearing the way for hip hop supremacy.

I had not been wrong when I had looked my leather studded and boot-leg drought beer buying guest in the eye and declared punk dead but I may as well have been. Punk, in all ways was dead but the corpse had a lot of very UN-natural twitching and moving to go before it was stilled. Worse, more than a few of these brightly dyed Mohawk, Doc Martin sporting hipsters would form their own versions of a punk band. Some were bad of course but more than expected were good. Some crossed genres such as Malcolm Swan and Jeff Sawatsky's brilliant “Office” who would open for Duran Duran and then beat the punk corpse back to it's grave.

I suppose you might say I should be grateful that young man never came back to call me on my error but thankfully he was so snookered on cheap illegal ale that he never recalled the conversation. Then again, as time has shown, what he did remember was erroneous.

Years later, despite my less than stout attempt, he would give credence to an event that not only never happened, would have been beyond the realms of known science and physics had it occurred. I tried to stop it but after a talented though adamant biographer of SNFU insisted that this former youthful punk hipster was correct, I just let it go. Who am I to let the truth stand in the way of a good story?

His crime of leading a writer to report a false story in the SNFU biography may be the kind of thing that gives writers a blow to their journalistic reputation but it is far exceeded by his and his fellow's creation of another corpse animating punk band.

Don't get me wrong, its not that the music was exceptionally bad, that would turn out to be my game. In fact, when sober, the Rabid Drunks were a lot of fun to slam to. The crime that a young Paul Balanchuck committed was he took his band and the music too serious at the time. He and other punk hipsters were dragging out the defibrillator paddles, screaming “Clear!” and attempting to shock punk rock's corpse into a Frankenstein Monster's existence of life. These days I comfort myself that if he and others had been successful, as in Mary Shelley's novel, the re-animated monster would have turned on them all and torn them to shreds.

I shudder thinking of the repercussions that would have followed. Punk Rock, once more fully alive would have returned with all it's nihilistic, self loathing, suicidal, anarchistic fury inspiring the next generation of musically drawn artists to head for the gutter if not the noose of a rope.

Ole Eminem, Slim Shady himself, emulating Sid and Nancy, starts spiking crank in his arm as he truly plays Oedipus with his mother, finally killing himself as his posthumous number of full length LPs totals one.

Michael Bubble never finds jazz and swing engaging enough turns to the Germs and the Descendants, piping out forty-five second songs of loud shrill screaming that because of Canadian content requirements, are played continuously on CBC radio stations during rush hour. The intense sounds are so frightening, drivers loose their concentration almost immediately, causing deadly multi-vehicle accidents and forcing organizations like MADD to encourage drunk driving if it means not listening to Bubble.

Jack Black, wasting no time with the frivolities and immature posturing of comedy, forgets things like Tenacious D and inspired by Nick Cave forges into manufacturing hardcore S&M porn where he helps Robin Williams into an even earlier death through erotic self asphyxiation. Disney Studios at a loss for a comic voice for their Genie in Aladdin cast Morgan Freeman and as adults fall asleep in the theatres to his soothing tones, enough children, equally bored, find packages of matches and burn down Cine-plexes world wide costing the lives of thousands of children and adults with minimal parenting skills.

All this because the twitching corpse of Punk Rock continued to thrive, ensuring more people were hoodwinked by false "cool" and into following the nihilistic side of anarchy and the Rite to Die.

Still, because the new hipster punks took it all too seriously, punk was getting it's asthmatic second wind. Punk, a musical and far less political beast at it's genesis, grew from people wanting to have fun. The desire to party to live music at a price even the unemployed could afford. The idea was if you could not afford David Bowie or Aerosmith at your local pub for a couple of quid, you sure as Hell could get Billy and his crayon eating cousin from down the block to play.

After all, if nihilism was correct and its all been done before and better than you could do it, what's the harm in actually doing it? After all, it looks like fun, right? Instead, to keep the corpse moving, these new breed of “punkers” latched on to hippie ideology to prolong the music. They had put life in the body by sucking all the fun out of it.

Yup, punk lay there, a non-fun, continually bouncing, twitching, fluttering corpse more annoying than Chloe Webb's portrayal of Nancy Spungeon crying for smack. In fact, something closely resembling Nancy Spungeon but a still alive, level of annoying unsurpassed till shotguns become attached to your mouth to make punk rock statements. An annoying something that may be likened to this day by an all to moving Courtney Love.

They say it's a lot more fun to shoot at a moving target and I am all about fun. I hold to the theory and ideology put forward by former National Lampoon and Car and Driver editor P.J. O'Rourke, “I don't worry about the difference between right and wrong, I worry about the difference between wrong and fun”. So, I suppose if punk was gonna keep moving, it should be no surprise some ass-hole like me would come along to try and get a few live rounds in. Preferably with some hollow points and a few incendiary tracers just to spice stuff up. That said, if I was gonna have a go at the corpse of punk rock I was going to do it with R. Mutt's urinal. Besides, no one had heard of Courtney Love back then and i have never owned a high powered rifle.

Now to understand my thinking here and why I wanted to base my musical project after a men's bathroom urinal, you have to know a little bit about Dadaism, an artistic philosophy that said if the artist said it was art, it was art, intellectuals and critics be damned. The same type of reasoning that helped birth punk in the first place.

Dadaism arose after the Great or First World War in the early decades of the twentieth century. Though partially a pacifistic response to that war, it was also adamant about having fun and challenging contemporary views. Helped along by other new innovative art ideology, like surrealism, Dada became the parent of some very memorable, wonderful and innovative artists. It gave rise in New York to Baroness Elsa Freytag Von Lorringhoven in the nineteen twenties, for example.

The Baroness, arguably New York's first punk rocker, was a model, a painter, a poet and published New York's first all female magazines and anthologies of poetry. Her hair dyed bright pink, her drab and carefully ripped dresses adorned with tin soldiers, held on by safety pins, she would invade the streets of New York. In one hand she held a cat-of-nine-tails, whipping men she felt were too “sure of themselves” while in the other was a fifteen inch dildo, affectionately called “Limb-Swish”, used to batter the nearest police officer into unconsciousness having come to arrest her for public indecency. Originally from Europe, Dadaism also brought her fellow post-war original Euro-Trash Dada artist, Marcel Duchampes to New York as well.

Duchampes was one of the founders of the Dada Movement and the movement, much like punk, was over run by something New York and New Yorkers sadly excel at making – Hipsters. These self styled proponents of all things Dada fawned all over Marcel. They were, as they saw it, the elite of New York's art scene, and they curried for Duchampes' favour and presence. Inviting him to upscale events and society parties, these pre-Depression Era hipsters exemplified all most everything dadaism was created to destroy.

It is my feeling that Duchampes truly embraced pacifism. If I was in his shoes, I would be returning to the last century's anarchist's penchant for explosives and covert assassinations. The pressure for Duchampes to whack these excuses for the Eugenics Movement must have been tremendous.

This surmised feeling I assumed of Duchampes must have hit it's height when these beacons of dadaism announced to their known world, New York, they would be hosting an art show to educate the low based public on the pure and open concepts of Dada.

Now this Dada art show was open to all to enter their art work, a brave move since anything you declared to be art could be entered. Duchampes, showing a now common mix of curiosity and loathing for all things produced by hipsters, decided to test these claimants to Dadaist ideals by entering something even he would find hard to accept as art, but assuredly would, being a man, of perhaps loose morals, but great integrity.

Taking urinal from a local pub's restroom, Duchampes simply turned it on its side and went about entering it in the New York art show. Of course, the art would have to have an artist and knowing if he used his name the urinal would not only face no opposition to it's entry but may well have been given a place of honour, he entered it under a pseudonym. With a couple strokes of a brush, after laying it on the side that “gravity dictated”, Duchampes created the existence of one R. Mutt, urinal thief and Dada artist.

For three weeks before the gala art show, the New York Dada community was beside itself. Arguments and heated exchanges flew back and forth as these protectors of artistic innovation fought among themselves over whether Duchampes', or R. Mutt's if you prefer, urinal was truly art and should be allowed in the show. It's not known if someone realized or discovered Marcel's joke at their expense or if they all just finally came to their senses but R. Mutt's urinal, with just hours before the opening, was allowed to be displayed.

So, sixty years later, in the grand city of Edmonton, two years after I had declared punk dead to a new initiate into Edmonton's new order punk scene, I was now witnessing the onslaught of hipster punks. Something had to happen. Somehow, if only for myself, I had to test these “New-Age Dadaists” and see if they were truly “punk”. My problem? What do I use as a urinal?

Thank God in Heaven for Terry “the Whining Weasel” Bestilney! My younger sister had been friends with Terry in Jr. High and though I didn't remember him as well as the man he had chosen to play bass guitar, Giles Borland, Terry, like Marcel Duchampes to New York hipsters, felt having me in the band would add legitimacy to his punk rock cred. The fact that I never called myself a “punk” and my dress and style looked more like Fred Rogers on a bad acid trip not withstanding, Terry could have made a worse call.

Myself? I saw my chance for a urinal and jumped right in (the band, not a urinal)!

If I could co-create something that sounded worse than punk itself, with songs that had no redeeming social or political message, I would be able to cast my porcelain masterpiece in “music” (or at least a decent facsimile of music). Still, it wasn't until I agreed to change the name of the first set of lyrics I wrote from “Fuck SNFU and Everybody Who Likes Them” to “So I Use Her Hole”, my answer to Chi-Pig's SNFU hit, “Victims of the Womanizer”, that the urinal began to take form enough that I could sign it.

When our drummer (who later died tragically in a roadside marching band accident, thus marking our near Spinal Tapp "drummer holocaust" problem) first asked me if I was "worried about people hating us?”, I stared at him in disbelief. Some how the fact that I referred to myself as “The Third Most Hated Man in Edmonton” seems to have escaped him. I would have liked to have claimed the number one spot or even the number two spot in local hatred but sadly, not enough people knew who I was. At the time I was still being beat out by the Mayor and local businessman and Oiler's owner Peter Pocklington.

It took awhile to get a name I liked but when we had to replace Giles Borland with Eric Smith as our bass player, I knew I now had an ally to push through a better name than Dog Breath. And Eric had one - Forty Foot Waves of Puke. It was a go for both Eric and I without hesitation. It described the band perfectly. Both were things you never wanted to be standing in front of. Terry had no choice as finding people to play with us was next to impossible, the hatred factor pushed away many "serious punks". No damage in my thinking as they were my reason for being on stage in the first place. Well, that and chicks handing out beer.

Thankfully, whenever Terry tried to disagree with us, Eric whipped him with his broken bass strings.

When our second drummer disappeared mysteriously with out a word or sign of where he had gone to (seriously... his room mates woke up one morning and he was gone, leaving everything behind but his UFO magazines), we held auditions. Every time a drummer talked about the band in a serious way, making mention of things like recording CDs, going on tour and all other respectable ventures in the music industry, Eric and I would vote against them. As soon as we had a head banger step up whose sole goal was pussy and beer, we knew we had found our drummer. They would usually last one or two shows and then would become too frightened to continue.

Terry of course objected to most everything Eric and I wanted - pole dancers, playing naked, having Terry fuck farm animals (They don't make bass strings that cause enough pain for that I fear) and other things he thought was too degrading for the band. The objections were usually met with hysterics and once or twice, actual crying. So much so we nearly voted to change the name to the Whining Weasel Project. But still we got a lot of what we wanted. We recorded three songs and you can hear them on You Tube. “Shrunken Head”, “Lysol Love” and “Bend Over For Satan”. Until I found these lyrics, stuffed among some old papers, those three songs may have been the only physical proof the band had existed at all.

And the hipster punks? If you want to know if they passed the test, the jury is still out and appears to be hung. One could say, as well hung as Ian Curtis.

We sold out every show we did and even opened for a few truly classic bands. No Means No comes to mind except they were actually performing as their “Fuck Band” personas (a “Fuck Band” being something real musicians do as a joke with the sole goal being to get laid by brainless groupies - much like Fort Foot Waves of Puke), The Hanson Brothers, complete with entire sets of hockey themed songs. But even that stinks of too much success to be sure of anything.

Any way, here are the lyrics to a song that was meant to pissed away. WAR PIG!

Suddenly you arrive and the fear is so insane

The media picks up your act,

soon everybody knows your name.

CHORUS

You're a WAR PIG Destruction all you understand

You're a WAR PIG Love no part of your plan

You're a WAR PIG Crush the world in your hand

You're a WAR PIG Nothing can stop you now

Blood beneath your boots, my guts are strung around

Bombs explode, bullets fly, I feel an end draw near

Time is on your side, never upon mine

What you wish will be, a WAR PIG must be free!

In a fiendish rage, like a glimpse of Hell

You torch the burning bodies

A stench you know so well.

CHORUS

You're a WAR PIG, etc.

Great machines of death, like lightening strike

You in their command, incinerating millions

Rape the wives and mothers, children watching scream

All will soon agree, a WAR PIG must be free!

Lies become exposed, so you must make a stand

God bless the spin doctors, battle is at hand

CHORUS

You're a WAR PIG etc.

The battle rages on, you know you dare not lose

With a flash of light, they got you by the balls

Relentless blasts and questions, pounding til you're deaf

Even the blind can see, a WAR PIG must be free!