PIZZA, BROKEDOWN VANS, AND THE ART OF SKY FUCKING

dis be a repost of my old blog about the time I went and saw Liquorball.

I first experienced the Liquor Ball mystery in 2002 at the tender age of 19. I was in LA staying with my parents, and taking a week off from school at UC Santa Cruz...been changing in many ways since recently seeing Comets On Fire play for the first time in Santa Cruz This trip was for mellowing out cos I'd just had a really bad acid trip(my last) and thought I was gonna flip over the edge. So I basically just smoked pot the whole time and spent hours putting my records on cassette so I didn't have to haul them back to SC on the greyhound. My buddy David called me one afternoon with his buddy Trevor. "Hey dude; Comets are playing at the Smell tonight, we're picking you up." OKAY. They were on their way to San Diego or up from there. can't remember. Real pot fiends. I call up my high school buds Philthy Jew and Sebastian the Black to meet us there. Dave & Trevor roll up to my folks' house in a maroon Cadillac that smells like leather socks and we head downtown. Our heads full of green blasting Slayer music. Cut to the alley outside the dingy club. I see Phil and Sebs for the first time in a while. "Hey who else is playing this show?" Phil cracks and points over to a band of longhairs in the lot standing around a van. "That must be the Santa Cruz band…" Phil was a barrel of yucks. I could barely talk I was so high. "That's the guy I work with" Trevor points to some bearded freak eating a baguette with black puss, oozing out the bottom. Washing it down with a soff drink-"blurp blurp" in between gulps. The whole time this horrible sound is coming out of the "club?". I saunter in, and continue to saunter for what seems like miles cos the noise is so loud. It felt like trudging against 40 mph hot dusty Sahara winds while wearing snow gear and skis injected with mercury. It is a brown weird loud in the metal box club. The details are blurry. There's this fat bearded dude playing an out of tune WOODEN guitar thing on stage through an unholy assortment of pedals. Another slightly overweight fella playing I think just a bass drum and a snare and a cymbal. playing some hillbilly train track rhythms...each of his limbs is out of phase with the rest. Then to the left a beachy longhair dirty fuck, Hawaiian shirt and all, pounding the liquid snot out of his fender through his lions' share of smashboxes and stomptones. There's someone else, maybe two someone elses on stage too; but like a magnet I float right towards the guitar dude and close my eyes for the rest of their no-doubt-about-it-being-improvised set. maybe another twenty minutes. who knows. This was just what I needed to hear a week after the worst and last acid trip of my teens. Retarded purple dragon battles in zero gravity. Soupy smog filling up my lungs and head, swirling all around the room. Midget wizard demons seeping out of the walls and spinning around everyone's heads. Injecting us through the ears into the brains with their needles filled with wizard goo. blood and sweat and goo and note-snot dripping out the nose. Everyone's nose is cold. They finally find a good place to stop and let everyone off. All I said was "fug".

I went outside and asked Trevor's bearded co-worker Rick Rubin look-a-like what band that was. "Liquorball" he said in an earthy tone. "That was fucking terrible. Awesome. Thanks guy." I stumbled off back to David. Phil and Sebastian had left. Comets hadn't even played yet. Those fuks didn't know what they were missing. I had sweat out a lot of the pot by this point and had a better grasp on what was going on. That bearded guy I talked to was the guy from Comets on Fire setting up his amp. OH! They had a new drummer too. . This is about Liquorball so I won't mention their set right now other than that it was loud & great.

A few months later I stopped going to school and devoted all my time to playing music and making pizza. Both in Santa Cruz. I got Trevor's job and did it for quite some time. The first two weeks one of the guys was on tour so I had twice the shifts. I wondered why somebody in a band that toured was working in that dump. (I still ask dumb questions like that) One day ETHAN RETURNS TO WORK. Oh it's that guy from Comets. OK. "You rule dude."

I come back from a delivery and he's blasting this crazy speedfreak garage shit like I never heard in my life.

"What is this?"

"MONOSHOCK" he says. "Ever heard of Liquorball?"

"Maybe, I think I saw them with you guys once in LA"

"Oh yeah, it's mostly the same guys. But that show was just a one-off they don't really play anymore"

It made sense to me now. Monoshock was their jokey surf rock band and Liquorball was the real shit. Maybe the other way around. Either way my search started for anything on cd or vinyl by these jerks from the bay area who fucked me up for quite a while. I loved them for it. I didn't find it too hard to find stuff living an hour from their hometown of Oakland/SF, and working at the record store in Santa Cruz at the time.

liquorball - FUCKS THE SKY

monoshock - MODEL CITIZZEN(Nitroglycerine)

These slabs found their way into my lap not too long after I started looking. "Fucks the Sky" sounded to me like a special school Mudhoney cough syrup heavy jam session. "Model Citizen" was the punk rock 7" I always dreamed of hearing or making in high school. But none of these were quite as fukked up as the show I'd been too. There had to be a live album. It wasn't until two years later when I was in Seattle of all places I had found ANOTHER copy of FUCKS THE SKY amongst a few other things. I brought my stash(Beegees, Shepp, etc.) up to the counter and the guy goes apeshit when he gets to the LIQUORBALL rekid. "DUDE!!!! THIS BAND IS AWESOME. DO YOU HAVE THE LIVE ALBUM?" He'd said the magic words.

"No. I was hoping they had one." (This doesn't happen anymore)

"WE JUST GOT ONE IN WITH THE SAME BUY AS THAT ONE! YOU CAN HAVE IT IF YOU WANT. 10 bucks cos it's got the insert" GIMME!!!!! The copy I got smelled like shit and made everything it touched smell the same way. I think there's actually bird shit on the cover. COOL! AN INSERT. A torn out piece of porno. Thanks guys. The porn it came with is some workout fetish that looks like Olivia Newton John or some shit doing squat thrusts in the buck. I put it on cassette so I don't have to smell it or touch the porn every time I listen to it. This record; the music on it, the packaging, the smell, the sound, the texture; perfectly encapsulates that show I went to and is actually better musically cos there's this fukked up organ all over the thing. Someone told me it was Quintron. Someone told me it was the ghost of Sun Ra. Someone told me it was a friend of the band who had taken a bunch of LSD and had never played a note in his life. I like to think it's the last two. It's called "LIVE FROM HITLER'S BUNKER" but it doesn't say that anywhere on the sleeve or vinyl. Just LIQUORBALL LIVES on one label of the record. After the show Eva Braun loved it; Hitler yelled "Play sumpsink German or GET ZE FECK AUF ZE STAGE!!!" after the first 10 minutes. Then they did all squat thrusts with Grady.

LIQUORBALL - "Fucks The Sky" LP

LIQUORBALL - "Live At Hitler's Bunker" LP

(JW told me about the keyboard player)