My Damage: The Story of a Punk Rock Survivor by Morris Keith

Author:Morris, Keith [Morris, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780306824074
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

BUD CLUB

Every New Year Jeffrey Lee Pierce and I would partake in the annual burning of one of Club Lingerie’s Christmas trees. After the New Masque shut down, Brendan Mullen became the talent booker at Club Lingerie, an eclectic rock and roll club. One night you could check out the Butthole Surfers or the Flaming Lips, and the next night you might see Big Jay McNeely or Screaming Jay Hawkins. Brendan would occasionally book punk rock bands from the old scene.

For the holiday season Club Lingerie would purchase these giant flocked Christmas trees. They’d buy the biggest ones they could find and stick these thirty-foot-tall trees in a corner of the stage, where they’d stay until about a week after New Year’s, when someone would drag them out into the alley. That’s when Jeffrey and I would make our move.

At around three or four in the morning we’d drag the trees into the middle of the intersection of Sunset and Wilcox. There was never any traffic at that hour, but we still had to be careful because there was a police station a block away. We’d set the trees upright in the middle of the street, and one of us would act as a spotter while the other set them ablaze.

Club Lingerie never watered the trees, so they were always completely dead and as dry as a bone. They might has well have had a sign on them that read, SET ME ON FIRE! So that’s what we did. Because the trees were so dry, they’d catch fire instantaneously. And they were so big and tall, they lit up the entire intersection like it was daytime. It was pretty spectacular.

It was a brash and bold maneuver on our part, not to mention stupid, but we did it every year and never got caught. It was our way of saying, “Fuck you!” to the Hollywood cops, whom we lived in fear of.

In those days, because I wasn’t doing enough drinking on my own, I was a member of a drinking association called the Bud Club. It started when I attended a gathering of another drinking club called the Royal Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo. All of the members were guys in bands who used it as an excuse to get together and drink. There were guys from Fishbone, Tex and the Horseheads, and the Vandals. I went to one of their meetings and made a suggestion they didn’t like: we set up an emergency fund in case somebody gets in an auto accident after a meeting. Everybody was getting so blitzed that it was only a matter of time before someone was hospitalized, or worse. Let’s take care of each other, I said.

They laughed me out of the room, so I took it upon myself to help start another drinking organization called the Bud Club. Our members included Greg Hetson, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, John Doe of X, Lee Ving and Derf Scratch of Fear, Chris Desjardins of the Flesh Eaters, Bob Forrest and Pete Weiss of Thelonious Monster, B.

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