Jerry A. Lang - Black Heart Fades Blue: Volume 3

this is a genuine rare bird book

Rare Bird Books
6044 North Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90042
rarebirdbooks.com

Copyright 2022 by Jerry A. Lang

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address:
Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department
6044 North Figueroa Street
Los Angeles, CA 90042

Set in Dante

epub isbn : 9781644282809

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request.

THANKSTo Adam Parfrey, for first hearing the rhythm of it. Tom Roberts, for convincing me it was worth it. Tyson, for seconding the motion. Jeff Larsen, for helping me take it out of the box, and George Pavlids, for helping me assemble it. Juxe Areta Goni, for the cover photograph. This is dedicated to Jennifer.

Contents

W hat you have in your hand is volume number three of a three-volume set. One and two came before this and you should read both before starting this one. In all honesty, if you dont have one and two, youll at least know how the story ends, and its a fun read. But that would be like eating your dessert first and skipping your dinner. Volume one has happy baby Jerry on the cover, volume two has bloody teenage Jerry. And this book, volume three, has adult Jerry on the cover. Do I look happy? Every day above ground makes me happy. Not to give the story away, Bloody teenage Jerry. Feel free to use that for a band name. If you have to explain a joke, its not funny.

The drug spiral had gone on long enough. It was music that had been my first love, and I longed for the day it would again come first. Before I move this story along to my battle with addiction, I want to talk about my other bands.

Over the years, there have been a lot of good bands in Portland that are today long forgotten. Ive played in more than a dozen bands myself, and I think a few of them were pretty good. There was Jungle Nausea, which was sort of like the Contortions but a little more tribal like Bow Wow Wow. I actually got kicked out of that band. I was tripping during a show at the Clinton Street Theater and people were throwing ice cubes at me. My eyes were spinning in my head at that show and the rest of the band decided they didnt want to put up with my problems anymore, theyd had enough. Another one of my short-lived bands was called The SIDS. The name was kind of a play on both the many Sid Vicious wannabes and sudden infant death syndrome. I could imagine a music critic describing us as being angular. All I know is that it was a fun group to play in. Wed improv songs and make up lyrics like Car Crash/Black Sky/Busted Light based on things we were seeing before our eyes.

In addition to those bands, Ive done time in Smegma, The Kinetics, The Stand, Pisswild Horses, SWAT, Gumby Anti-Christ, and Gift. Ive collaborated with Dare to Defy, Killer of Sheep, Anti-Seen, 25th Coming Five, Jenny Dont & the Spurs, The Phantom Notes, The Ransoms, and Decimation Front. I practiced with some bands when I was down in SF that I never joined, including Bad Posture. Ive been a one-time Elvis impersonator. Ive performed with the Hard-Ons, Big Stick, Brad Boatwright, The Nightbirds, and The Eyelids. There have been a few projects that didnt quite work out. For instance, Jeff Dahl from The Angry Samoans came and made a record with the band. I think he might have stayed with Tom for a few days, though Im not sure. I was supposed to go in the studio with Jeff and the band and cover some Dead Boys songs, but things kept getting in the way, namely my drug habit. So I did miss out on that experience, unfortunately, and it wasnt the only missed opportunity. Recently, theres been talk of collaborating on something with Paul Bearer from Sheer Terror. I think that could be interesting. Yes, Poison Idea is my main group, the one I poured my heart and soul into, but Ive enjoyed other musical alliances and experiences.

Many bands are lost to history. That said, quite a few local bands broke out in the nineties and two thousands, and they kind of put Portland on the map. Some broke big, and probably contributed to putting the city on the hipster trail, along with places like Brooklyn, Austin, and San Francisco. Some of these bands I like and some not so much. But I know lots of stories. As Im writing this book, I have a podcast that I do every Friday morning on House of Sound, a cool, free-form nonprofit radio station that advertises as being Portlands only uncensored radio. Ive thought about telling some of those stories on internet radio but havent yet.

Heres just one example. Theres a big local rock star who is a compulsive liar. Ill protect his identity here. I know a guy who went on tour with his band as part of the road crew. They were playing a big arena and backstage one member of the road crew began talking about what it was like when he lived in South Central LA. How it was such a dangerous neighborhood. Then he related a wild story about a huge gas leak. It was so big that it blew out every window in the immediate vicinity, and it killed a guy by blowing his head clean off his body. The head was found four blocks away. The big rock star listened intently as the story was being told. Then he did his sound check and left for a meal break. A few hours later, hes back in the dressing room, talking to the road crew and part of his inner circle, and maybe a few fans who had gotten backstage. And he says, Did I ever tell any of you about the time when I lived in South Central? And then he proceeded to tell the roadies story word for word as if it were his own. The crew kind of laughed along nervously at first. They thought he was just fucking around and would acknowledge the source. But he never did, and they began to realize he believed what he was saying. He was just plain crazy.

How was PI doing at this time? Well, when the crazy rock star was lying his ass off and playing coliseums, I got a royalty check from Italy. It turned out that some band I had never heard of had covered one of our songs. How much was it for? I think it was a dollar and fifty-one cents. It wasnt even worth cashing. Like I had told Wurzel from Motrhead, we werent getting rich doing this. By chance, the day it arrived, I got a mail-order request from some kid who wrote that he was a big fan. When I filled his order, I enclosed the royalty check, thinking it might be a cool souvenir for someone who really liked the band. Id sometimes do that, if I had something cool lying around that would be a unique memento. It might be a cut-and-paste collage I had made, or a postcard of Black Bart with one of his bandit poems, or an old show flyer of, say, a Scratch Acid/Hell Cows show that definitely had some history, whatever was handy. I tried to imagine what it might have been like for me to get a relic like that from, say, Johnny Cash or The Kinks.

Japan. I made a brief allusion to Japan earlier in this tale of woe. But I didnt say much about it, so why not here.

I got clued into Japanese hardcore pretty early on. Tom and I knew of some of the older punk and new wave bands like The Stalin and The Plastics (who had even toured the US and performed on American TV). But then we started hearing early hardcore, plus more experimental noise bands like Hidjokaidan, Hanatarashi, and Merzbow. Pretty extreme stuff. The music would come to us from many sources. I think Pushead turned us on to some of the bands. The underground was a small world unto itself. Tom and I each had the ultra-rare flexi single by State Children, a head-peeling record that would sound like utter noise to almost everyone, but which is worth a small fortune today. By that point, we had begun keeping our ears pointed to Japan. They didnt influence us and we didnt influence them, but we appreciated what they were doing. You could hear some influences, like early Discharge, in Japcore. But it really was its own unique thing. People from other scenes have told me that punks in Portland were more up on what was going on in Japan. Maybe geography had something to do with it: Portland is almost exactly the same distance from London and Tokyo. Actually, I think were about seventy-five miles closer to Tokyo.