INTRODUCTION AND DEDICATION

I already hear my detractors fuming: What the fuck does he have a “Best Of” record for????? Who the fuck does he think he is, Billy Fucking Joel???????

Yes. I think I am Billy Fucking Joel. Right.

And fuck my “detractors.” If everyone loved me, well, I just wouldn’t be doing my job. If you don’t piss off a few people now and again you’re not trying hard enough.

Between 1985 and 1995 I was extremely focused on being a Holy Terror on drums. I recorded four albums with my band Sharky’s Machine, two Raunch Hands records, one Pleasure Fuckers LP (plus a couple of singles), two GG Allin records (one studio, one live), produced several excellent bands and made a couple of idiotic one-off singles, did 6 or 7 tours of Europe, one really great tour of Japan, around 200 shows in Spain where I lived full-time between 1992 and 1995, plus countless New York shows including a short stint with the Lunachicks and various other punk, country, and rockabilly bands. Does that seem like a lot? I dunno. I’ve been fortunate to be able to take this whole thing a lot further than I ever dreamed. I won’t say lucky – you gotta make your own luck through hard work. Since I first started playing I’ve never cruised, not once, not for a second. I played every show, and went in to record every record, like it was gonna be the last. Like James Brown says, you gotta step up and do the Popcorn, and that means every night, no excuses. That’s how I did it, that’s how I still do it. I’m a believer.

Rock n roll is a drug. Once you get the bug, you’re fucked. To go on the road and live the lifestyle I put my career as a magazine editor on the back burner, destroyed good relationships with fantastic women, and didn’t have a place to live for giant chunks of and time. It’s not a unique story: every one who does this makes these kinds of sacrifices. (That’s why the PUNK ROCK RUINED MY LIFE T-shirts are such a hot item!) But if I wasn’t hooked on rock’n’roll like it was some sick strain of methedrine, and didn’t spend all of my time pursuing it, I’d never have dropped out of two good schools and I’d be the President of the United States. That’s right. President. And now we’re ALL fucked. See? Punk rock ruined your life, too. Buy a shirt.

The shelf life of an independently-produced rock n roll record, even a good one, even a great one, can be pretty short. But the music does not go away. There’s no reason why good rock’n’roll records have to live like closet classics. The fads and the flash-in-the-pans will die, the real stuff lives forever. I’m pretty sure this is why God gave us the Internet.

It took a lot of thought and careful consideration to distill those years down to a dozen tracks. I wrote a lot of songs and spent real time in all of these bands: Four fucked up years of Sharky’s Machine, a few years on-and-off with GG when he wasn’t in jail (or dead), three sleepless years with the Pleasure Fuckers... I joined the Raunch Hands in 1990 and we just played the RH 20th Anniversary show in November 2004 in Austin, TX. For this compilation I had something like 80 songs to choose from. If after all that I couldn’t come up with 12 bona fide classic ass-kickers, well, I suck.

I don’t suck.

If anyone ever left a show not saying “Holy shit that band was awesome and the drummer was a monster, suave-as-fuck, a mutherfucking machine gun,” I felt like I had failed. I didn’t get in this to be a sheep, I did it to set the world on fire. Sharky’s Machine did a gig in Bern, Switzerland on our first tour of Europe, using the opening band’s gear. The drummer was literally in tears (tears!) watching me play. No shit, just crying “Please, Not so hard, It is the only drums for which that we have…” Really I wasn’t doing anything TOO crazy (e.g. throwing them across the bar, playing the snare drum with the floor tom, setting them on fire… all that would come later), just PLAYING them. I mean, the proscribed method of playing the drums is to HIT them with WOODEN STICKS. That’s how we do it. Anyway, the drums were fine (I am, after all, a professional) and we became pals and spent a lot of time that night talking about drums and drummers, and when I came back to that town the next year with Sharky’s Machine he brought all his friends out to see me, and again about three years later with the Raunch Hands, and a couple years after that when I came through with the Pleasure Fuckers. By then I had my own personal cheering section, which just made me feel unbelievable. If you can get the warm-fuzzy while beating a snare drum into kindling… wow. For me playing the drums is a very personal statement and it makes me feel great when people GET IT. That’s why I did it then, that’s why I’m still doing it now, singing and guitarring and everything else with the ROCKET TRAIN.

Each of the bands on HOW PUNK ROCK figured largely in my life as Big Adventures -- and all of these bands were Mighty in their own right. I am extraordinarily proud of the contribution I was able to make. Playing with these folks was a privilege that I never take for granted, and I want to thank everyone, everyone, who was part of it from the bottom of my heart, every one who came out to see us, helped with the booking or fed us or let us crash on their floors or drink all their booze or turned us on to drugs and strange local customs or kept things interesting in a million other sordid ways. So, with no apologies, here’s my Best Of, Vol. 1, Dedicated to everyone who wished me well. All the rest can go to hell.

HOW PUNK ROCK RUINED MY LIFE

PART I: “FRANKLY, I DON’T CALL IT MUSIC”

Sharky’s Machine was pretty much a fucked up mess right from the git-go. I had the idea to start a hardcore/punk/thrash band that was somehow loyal to all my roots rock, art damaged, high energy ideals: something like Motorhead meets Muddy Waters, with some Capt Beefheart, Stooges, and Troggs thrown in.

I was 19.

It was purely an experiment. I had never written songs before and had just bought my first guitar.

This was 1983, a year before I dropped out of the New York University Film School. (In fact we did one show at NYU which resulted in our first riot, the beginning of a nasty trend of violence surrounding the group, although in this case it was a bunch of frat-boy pussies and student gov’t types who got their panties up in a bunch. Later it would be bikers, soundmen, humorless club owners, audience members who had been attacked by the singer (with, for example, a broken bowling trophy), and of course, the band turning in on itself.

I had been playing the drums in blues bands mostly at keg parties in high school, and dicking around with some punk rockers doing Heartbreakers and Sex Pistols covers in my basement. Unfortunately, my blues loving stoner pals and my punk rocking kill-all-things-hippy pals did not speak the same language. They were like lions and lambs. Not being the Messiah (no, seriously), I couldn’t get them to lie down together even after a good pill jag. When I got to college I was still determined to break down the wall (between dem blues and dat crazy punk rock sound) and had the idea to start Killdozer. The name came from a bad made-for -TV movie about a construction site being taken over by aliens (space aliens, not Mexicans). After the Wisconsin band came out with the same name, we changed ours to Sharky’s Machine. (From the Burt Reynolds movie. We were recording the record that would become “Let’s Be Friends” with Kramer at Noise New York and were newly nameless. Jim Schuermann, our singer, and I watched it on acid one night and decided, sagely, that it would be a swell thing to call ourselves. When we came into record the next night we announced that we had the name. Unbelievably, after weeks of arguing over a name — before The Burt Epiphany I had wanted to call the band “The Super Intelligent Destroyer,” but no one was having it — everyone said, “Sure, great, let’s get to work.” (!!!!!)

I had recruited Alec Dale to play guitar (actually I asked Mike Mariconda first – we had played briefly in a garage band called the Empire State Combo and had become fast friends, tripping, listening to Trout Mask Replica, and talking to trees… Mike said he liked the idea but was onto something else, the something else that would become the Raunch Hands). What I didn’t realize at the time was that Alec is a dangerous psychopath, a pundit on almost everything and a manic obsessive about guitar solos, pretty much exactly what I didn’t want in my band. But he was very enthusiastic about the project, and besides, I figured it wouldn’t last, so who cared? (I never thought this would last more than a couple of gigs and maybe some recording. Three years later when we were in London opening for Sound Garden and Mudhoney I just had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.) I mean Alec is a nice guy and an intelligent guy, and can be very funny, he’s just completely insane and I have a lot of difficulty being around him. He makes me nervous. On bass we got Toni Ostrow, a sweeter girl you could not imagine, and a good baseball fan. She fit right in, except she couldn’t play. But she was into it, so I taught her the songs I was writing, figuring what the fuck, she didn’t need to know anything else, this was an art project as much as a rock band and if she didn’t know every Elmore James song or even the Johnny Thunders catalogue, well, it didn’t matter, and besides, this would keep her focused on the Sharky’s Machine songs and maybe I would get to achieve my mission of creating a blues-based, slightly-damaged thrash band without everyone trying to bring in their own stuff and dilute the purity of my vision. (Hmmf!!!) (It should be noted that playing along with me was not the easiest thing in the world, and at some point, Toni learned how to lock in and provide a pretty solid bottom to what could have easily become a chaotic din.)

Jim was a wino/poet/super brain from St. Louis who had never sung before, a guy who wrote incredibly brilliant lyrics and put together images and words that could really ride a warped Morrison/Dylan/Burroughs axis of absurdity and love and loneliness and frustration and rock star posturing (a lot better than sacred cows like Patti Smith), a guy who knew as much about philosophy and history as anyone you are likely to meet, a guy who had impeccable taste in the ridiculous, who loved equally Frank Sinatra and Iggy Pop and Robert Johnson and Ornette Coleman and also Romper Room records and other jewels now prized by self-conscious ironic hipsters (he was way ahead of his time), except he couldn’t figure out how to hook up the stereo or light the oven or pay the phone bill and was notoriously bereft of social graces and lifestyle-maintenance skills, like doing his laundry on a timely basis. All of this contributed to a band of misfits whose sum was so much greater than its parts – Jim especially shocked everyone at how great a singer he could be, crooning, hollering, getting the Iggyisms and the Jaggerisms just right, howling lyrics far too complex for a punk band, screeching and really digging into some incredibly soulful stuff… and tearing up the stage and himself. If that boy had any discipline he coulda been a contendah, no shit.

Somehow we managed to make a few pretty cool records. It happened this fast —

KRAMER: (We just finished playing our set at the incredible No Se No bar on Rivington Street, opening for his band Shockabilly.) Hey, you guys are great. Do you guys want to make a record for my new label?
US: Uh, sure.
KRAMER: Do you guys want to go on tour in Europe, starting in Amsterdam in the fall?
US: Uh, sure.

Things got a little weird after the first record with Kramer when we caught him with his hands in the cookie jar, so to speak. And calling him a “child fucker” on Dutch National Radio probably didn’t help, but by then another lunatic, Tom “Speedy Gonzalez” Spindler had picked up the reigns with his LSD label in Berlin. (A couple of years later we recorded the still unreleased “Don’t Be a Food Fussy” in Berlin, as crazy a city — before the Wall came down — as there ever was. Anyone who wants to hear it should e mail me. It’s really good.)

THE TAMING OF THE SKULL (From A Little Chin Music EP, LSD/Berlin, 1988) is from the first session we did after the schism with Kramer and Shimmy Disc. Don’t ask me what the fuck the title is about, but it does contain the great line “Fay Wray is robbing a bank, Her mind is bubbling on crank.” A typically over-heated Shark-take on a rock’n’roll song (“like skiing out of control,” someone said at the time), this was recorded with the great Wharton Tiers who is still my Number One Super Favorite Engineer in the World. He told me this was the only session he ever did where he saw the band get into an actual fist fight in the studio.

Alec and Jim used to drive each other crazy. Alec would never shut up about his guitar solos. (I wonder what Alec thinks about Spinal Tap. I wonder if it hurts his feelings.) And Jim was always bumping into him on stage doing that punk rock St Vitus hop – which was pretty good, actually . Between Jim and me we put on a very over-the-top auto-destruct kind of rock’n’roll Muppet show. Extremely visceral, mucho fun. Besides John Coltrane, we dug professional wrestling, and we took it to the stage.

My father once came to a Sharky’s Machine show – probably the only one we ever played where you actually could sit down at a table. I thought it would be a good opportunity for the Old Man to see what his first-born was up to. The show was at the famed Folk City on Third Street, famous coz Bob Dylan got his start there, and we were opening up for Sonic Youth. I suppose a few chairs and tables and some drums did get, well, airborne, but it was a terrific gig and some fanzine even named it “show of the year.” Afterwards my dad said, “I’ve seen your band, I’ve seen the way you throw your equipment around, and frankly, I don’t call it music.” Years later he would say “If you were that good don’t you think you would have made it already?” No, really, he’s a nice guy.

Anyway, at some point during the recording session with Wharton Alec was complaining about Jim’s artistic temperament. Jim could be a complete fucking diva – for all of his vast talent there was too little professionalism and too much cheap booze, which made the whole sensitive artist thing pretty intolerable. At one point Alec just said, “Fuck him, just let him sing whatever he wants. It’s not like we’re gonna use any of this crap.” Of course Alec didn’t realize that Jim could hear him through the talk-back mic. Jim threw down his headphones, stormed back into the control room, and punched Alec in the head. This was how we made records. (Sometime I’ll tell you about how Jim and I got into a fist fight on stage in front of like 200 people. Oh, and then there was the time I broke a bottle on an amplifier and threatened to cut Alec with the jagged end, just like a cowboy movie or one of those 1950s juvenile delinquent/high-school-gone-wrong flicks. It was only at a rehearsal, but man, it felt GOOD. Oh, those were the days….)

By the time we finished the second European tour I had had it with the whole lot of them (not that I’m a day at the beach, either), and I broke up the band and the record we recorded while we were staying in Berlin never came out (Call me! It’s great!). Anyway, Taming of the Skull, great rocker. Btw, that’s my future crime partner Chandler from the Raunch Hands on harp during the big train drum roll break down.

ROADHAWG is from the Kramer/Noise sessions (Let’s Be Friends LP, Shimmy Disc, 1987) and is one of my favorite things I’ve ever recorded, the whole thing just nailed the sound I heard in my head at the time, a fucked up mess of Stooges-style blues and free jazz and bad ass hard rock skronk ‘n’ roll and noise with a toxic dose of fuck you attitude. Got that? Gary Windo played the saxophone and he was just amazing. We were lucky to get him. Gary had played with Todd Rundgren and I think someone said something about him working with Pink Floyd, too (!!!), but of course he also did his own crazy thing and he just devoured the part. The riff is stolen from a Freddie King number. I showed it to Gary on the piano and he just took off on it. I’m pretty sure it was no more than two takes to get the whole thing, and the second take was just him doubling up on the first part. He was absolutely fantastic. I think the lyrics were inspired by Michael Herr who wrote “Dispatches” – he was one of Jim’s favorite writers. The cool guitar fuzz is coming from a plastic amp powered with flashlight batteries.

CHEVY VAN BLUES is another from Let’s Be Friends. This one got a lot of radio play in Europe and was a staple of the live set. “Pretty Woman, Pretty Man, Makin’ Love in Chevy Van.” Can’t get any more simple than that, especially for Jim whose lyric sheets usually resembled inky roadmaps with enough high-priced words to make the heirs of Nathaniel Webster weep like little girls. Features a snare drum sound that can best be described as “crap.” But I was young and didn’t know how to sweet talk engineers yet. Oh well.

KLDZR HWY – (ditto). When we played with our friends the Raunch Hands (1987/88) everybody loved it when we did ballads or straight ahead or funny punk rock songs, and they got a little agitated when we came on with the full onslaught of crashing drums, thrash beats, power chords, and what -- to an untutored ear -- may sound like screaming. Ditto, pro-wrestling inspired riff-bashing and avant noise explorations like the “Devastating Samoan Drop” were more likely to inspire fist-fights and flying bottles than bouquets of flowers being lofted towards the stage. When we opened up for The Ramones at Vassar College shit started flying at us on the very first NOTE.

Sharky’s Machine was always caught between a rock and a hard place: once you’ve played with the Circle Jerks or Henry Rollins you’re bagged as a “hardcore band,” But the hardcore kids didn’t understand the ballads or the Stones’ covers, just like the rockers/college radio crowd never got the 1000 miles-per-hour punk rock assault.

I think in some ways we were an important post-punk-proto-grunge band (yeah, I know, whatever) – aside from the thrash and deconstructed roots music there was a very unique depth of emotion in Sharky’s Machine. We were always mixing sensitive, loner love songs and some pretty far out poetry with full blown, guitar-driven ROCK and those big loping beats that became all the rage later on, and we covered Neil Young years before the West Coast flannel shirt crowd got around to it (“Vampire Blues”). But at the time a lot of people did not know what to make of us, although those who got it REALLY got it and kept coming back, especially in Europe where our fans had an almost proprietary feeling about the band BECAUSE we weren’t like anyone else and because we put on these crazy, unpredictable, very personal shows. I think if we were a little smarter and just a tad more sophisticated about what we were doing and had a little guidance and/or management we could’ve gone further than we did.

Nahhhhh….. not with that crew. Oh well.

KLDZR HWY, also known as ROUTE KILLDOZER, is a tidal wave of rolling thunder, desert blues, and bizarrely personal singing from Jim. I’m not sure it’s rock’n’roll, but I dig it. I know a lot of our friends didn’t get it then. They probably still don’t.

COMING SOON…
THE RAUNCH HANDS GET LOADED !
GG ALLIN GETS SCREWED !
THE PLEASURE FUCKERS GET SHARKY ! ! !