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takeeachdayonebookatatime · 4 months

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Why did you elbow me? 171

Achilles Castle part 73

Lemonade and lies PART 16

Dr Burkett: pov I would like to schedule her for a sleep study as soon as possible. With her medical history and PTSD she might not be getting as much sleep as we think.

Jim: pov for lunch I offer to get me and Castle some sandwiches, Kate is having soup for lunch. As I walk to the hospital cafeteria my phone starts ringing. It's an old friend of mine calling. He wants to know if I want to hang out, he moved years ago so we don't see each other as much. He is visiting the city and wants to know if we could catch up. Fred that sounds great but I'm visiting my daughter at the hospital, she has a cold and because she has underlying health issues she is at risk for complications. Fred offers to meet me at the hospital, how nice of him. I text Castle letting him know what is going on. I head back to Katie's room and hand Castle his food.

Fred Mirsur: pov I find Jim in the hospital cafeteria. I ask him how he is doing and he says okay just worried about my daughter Katie. You said on the phone she has a cold and something about her having underlying health issues which puts her at risk for complications. Jim says Katie has a heart condition, I had no idea she had one. Is it bad or are the Dr's just being cautious. He mentions it from a shooting she had a few years ago she was shot at her Captain's funeral, had to have emergency heart surgery, had multiple cardiac arrest, suffers from PTSD and has a weakened immune system. Wow Jim, it sounds like she is one tough girl. Do you think it would be okay if I visited her room for a few minutes, you know say hi. I haven't seen her since she was little.

Castle: pov Jim is back in the room with an old friend of his named Fred. The guy wanted to say hi to Kate. I tell Jim that Jenny is coming over to have some girl time with Kate so why don't you spend some time catching up with your friends. I'm actually going home to get some writing done while the girls hang out. He agrees and they both head off.

Jenny: pov since Sarah Grace is at school I decide I'm going to stop at the store and pick up some snacks and a movie so me and Kate can have some girl time together. I know it's hard being stuck in a hospital bed. The trip to the store shouldn't take that long. Castle replied back to my text letting me know what snacks Kate can eat. In the nutrition center an employee asks if I need help. I ask him if the store carries any caffeine free chocolate. He says rudely chocolate doesn't have any caffeine in it, I tell him chocolate actually does. He then asks me how sensitive I am to caffeine, oh I have no problems with caffeine it's for my friend she is in the hospital with a cold and with her having a heart condition the Dr's want to keep an eye on her and I thought a movie day would be nice to take her mind of off things. So caffeine is a big no no. Another employee comes over having heard what I said. He points out a chocolate she can have and even mentions a drink that would be safe for her. His grandma has heart issues, nothing too bad though. Just has to watch what she eats.

Spencer grocery store employee: pov Jenny says Kate's heart issues is from a shooting she was shot at her Captain's funeral had to have emergency heart surgery, suffered a few cardiac arrest, has PTSD and a weakened immune system. She must be one strong woman, Jenny says you have no idea.

Liv: pov Carisi thinks he can make the charges stick. Me, Fin and Elliot are still helping Ryan and Esposito finish up the case. Amanda's case thankfully isn't that bad. Our guy Joe Fletcher is going to spend a very long time in jail for his crimes if it wasn't for him murdering our suspect he might never have been caught. The other criminals are also going away for a while. Because Kate has health issues they could be charged with attempted murder of a police officer. Which is a big charge, we just have to prove they wanted her or us dead. Svelte did mention something about how we were supposed to die. That is what the chemicals in the air were for.

Kate: pov Jenny arrives with a bag full of snacks and a few other things. She asks if I want to feel the baby move. It feels so weird to me. Jenny puts the movie in and gets the snacks and drinks set up. I’m starting to feel sleepy.

Jenny: pov about halfway through the movie I notice Kate is asleep. I text Castle letting him know the movie is almost over. When he arrives back at the hospital he thanks me for spending time with Kate,

Carisi: pov how much chemicals were in the room, not sure we weren't in there long enough for it to affect us. Liv tells me Kate on the other hand has a heart condition and previous chest trauma so it affected her worse. We might have a better chance with the attempted murder of a police Captain, charges sticking. I'm meeting with their lawyers in a few minutes.

Fin: pov I bump into Elliot in the breakroom. He is trying to get info out of me on Liv's dating life. I'm not going to cave. I tell him to just ask her for the info. Liv is making sure the rescued girls are getting the help they need. We have finally finished interviewing everyone. This case is almost over. Me and Noah already have plans for our video game night. To be continued. .....

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shrinnirs · 9 months

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December 17, 2010 interview for the Shrinnirs "Early Singles" collection Josh Burkett put together and released on his Mystra record label in collaboration with the Father Yod record label.

Byron = Byron Coley

Josh = Joshua Burkett

Joe = Joe Malinowski

Byron: What’s on this LP?

Josh: The first three singles, plus some unreleased stuff from around then.

Joe: Some of it’s from a 10” that never came out.

Byron: Who was doing the 10”?

Joe: Charlie Krich. He had a label in the early ‘90s, Vandal Children Records. Our !Me da Una Rabia! 7" from 1992 was released jointly by Tulpa and Vandal Children.

Byron: The Bimbo Shrineheads more or less mutated out of Eclectic Bitch?

Joe: Yeah. Well at that time Eclectic Bitch was a name that dawn liked for herself. I just wanted to call the band the dawn cook band or dawn cook, but she said if we were going to do that, her pseudonym would have to be Eclectic Bitch.

Byron: The earliest stuff was done as a duo?

Joe: It started out as a duo, then we went through a bunch of bass players in a real short time. None of them recorded with us. We had one guitar player -- William Stuart – for a while, then after he left, Josh joined on bass and sax for a couple of years.

Byron: Did you already know Wayne & Kate by that point?

Joe: We met them at WHUS radio, sometime around then. When Josh was with us we opened for the Laughing Hyenas and Crystalized Movements at the Populous Pudding. That was a great show.

Byron: What was Josh’s hair like when he was in the band? Did he have that big Euro he had in Vernonster?

Josh: That was the biggest hair I ever had.

Byron: It was like John Sinclair’s. How much sax did you play with the band?

Josh: It was just occasionally.

Joe: He preferred bass, but dawn and I were always trying to get him to play more sax.

Byron: Did you jam much at live shows?

Joe: We mostly played songs. There was a lot of visual stuff. dawn had put together a slide show. dawn and I jammed when on our own recording the type of stuff that appeared on the Liminal Switch LPs, but usually stuck to the songs when working with Josh or other people.

Byron: What was dawn's stage presence like then, and what was her most outrageous costuming?

Joe: dawn brought some of her artwork with her like a car windshield she had smashed up and painted. She was in to rummaging through junked out autos for raw art material. In retrospect, I guess we were an on stage car wreck of a band. dawn would wear a lot of make-up applied asymmetrically, the left side of her skull was shaved and painted in a checkerboard pattern, and she had skirts made of duct tape and used to add tin foil here and there. A lot of her clothes were held together with staples or duct tape or occasionally nuts & bolts for heavier fabrics. She wore men's boxers for shorts during the summer. The first show I have a photo of has dawn playing guitar in front of a Knights of Columbus bingo display board, wearing a mesh Boston Bruins jersey and ripped up long-johns for pants which she had decorated with several crayon drawings. None of it seemed all that outrageous to me, since she wore the same type of stuff off stage. She had a TV set with the picture tube removed. She sometime wore that on her head on stage. I remember her wearing it at the El'n'Gee Club in New London, near the submarine base, while she played Tuli Kupferberg's "Go Fuck Yourself With Your Atom Bomb" on accordion. She also used to play "I'm Going to Kill Myself Over Your Dead Body If You Fuck Anyone But Me". She loved Tuli. During our first few years of playing out, dawn would usually start the set solo on acoustic guitar, or just acapella, and occasionally on accordion. She only played accordion in public a few times because she didn't feel very confident on it. She used it more like a harmonium. dawn also used to bring onstage artwork Colette Butterick had left behind in the Populous Pudding, lifesized standup figures of Caspar Weinberger, Oliver North and other Iran-Contra characters prettied up in frilly pink ballet tutus. Colette was an intriguing presence in Willimantic. During the early 1980s her son played drums in the White Pigs and the Separates. Colette put out the Separates 7" single and turned her basement in to a punk rock show space with a tiny stage. I didn't know Colette well, but appreciated her rare appearances at the Pop Pudding, particularly the night she strung herself like a tree in Christmas lights and plugged herself in to an electrical wall socket for a poetry reading.

Byron: Seems like you guys got a lot of good opening slots.

Joe: Well I was working at Platter Connection Record Store. It’s where I first met you and Jimmy Johnson. You stopped in while on a visit to Ziesing Bros book shop. It wasn't all that great of a record store, but I met a lot of bands there, and as music director at a college radio station, and by booking shows in Willimantic. It was just fellow bands helping each other out.

Byron: When Willimantic was a hotspot still. Before Ziesing moved.

Joe: Yeah, I spent one depressing birthday helping Mark Ziesing move his bookstore, hauling boxes of books down flights of stairs to the 18-wheeler. A sad day for Willimantic.

Byron: Lili still has her shirt from there – Radical Lesbian Feminists from Outer Space.

Joe: Our friend Joey Zone did the art for that.

Byron: It was a weirdly happening nexus. I was never there when the anarchist Ziesing brother was still around...

Joe: Yeah, he moved to Thailand. That store was where I found my first record by the Ex in 1982. Mike Ziesing used to have punk bands there on occasion during the early to mid 1980s. The store was divided in to separate sections. Mark Ziesing used most of his for sci-fi stuff and other lit, Allison Meyers owned the feminist and poetry section, and Mike Ziesing sold records along with 'zines and anarchist books. Plus, Wayne Woodward’s comics section. After the Ziesing Bros. closed up, Allison opened Everyday Books, first in her house and later as a cafe in downtown Willimantic. Allison published Mary Ellen Meikle's poetry. dawn used Mary Ellen's words on a couple of songs. One of them is on this record.

Byron: Did you guys have a lot more songs than you recorded?

Joe: We just have live tapes of them. That’s why we reissued the Live at Charlie’s cassette from 1992 on CD-R a few years ago. There are lots of songs dawn wrote that we never properly recorded.

Byron: It’s interesting. It seems like the band’s basic sound has stayed relatively stable throughout decades of activity and inactivity.

Joe: Well, ever since we first started playing together we were just making it up as we went along.

Byron: dawn’s basic sound had been folk before that?

Joe: Yeah. She was very briefly in a group called Bruce Bayne and the Dawn of the Living Dead Band. Otherwise, her background was in performing folk music at coffee houses, street protests, and fund raising potluck dinners.

Byron: How did she decide she wanted to go freak?

Joe: We were listening to early Sonic Youth and the Ex. We both dug the heck out of the Minutemen. Eventually Dawn really got in to the few ESP albums I had. I remember Patty Waters made a big impact on her. She also liked Frank Lowe's Black Beings album. Most frequently I'd find her listening to my old Nonesuch Explorer and Folkways ethnomusicology LPs when she was home alone with my records. But what stands out in my memory is how she enjoyed God & The State, that Ruins album with the Urinals drummer. She was crazy about that record. She still sings those songs in the car.

Byron: So you were the bad svengali record scum guy. Well every band story needs one.

Joe: We met at a college radio station in 1985 about a year before we first started playing music together. Dawn hosted a show that concentrated on articles she would share from underground newspapers and 'zines, along with interviews with fellow activists. She would mix in anti- authoritarian songs here and there. Whatever she could find, from Victor Jara to Gil Scott- Heron. The packaging on a Maximum Rock'n'Roll comp caught her eye and she grew a little curious about punk rock as a vehicle for expressing her political views. I just offered suggestions like, "if you're in to Gil Scott-Heron, maybe you would like the Last Poets," or "if you're into political punk, you might appreciate Crass and KUKL." Then from there, "since you like that stuff, you should definitely check out The Ex."

Byron: You later got to play some shows with the Ex. How were they to deal with in those days?

Joe: They were great. They stayed with us for a few days on their first U.S. tour in 1989. We opened for them in Storrs along with 76% Uncertain and Azaila Snail. The Ex didn’t have many shows outside of New York. They made a trip to Montreal and came back to Willimantic. They’d bought a beat up old station wagon for their tour. It kept breaking down. So they were stuck with us.

Byron: And you got to feed them for a week.

Joe: Actually, they fed us. Their sound guys even fixed dawn’s car for her. They were amazing. Just really nice people. We didn't even blame them when our beloved indoor cat was run over after the band talked us out of imprisoning him inside.

Byron: Did you play out of town much?

Josh: They did a U.S. tour.

Joe: We played New York and DC for Riot Grrrl shows even though we were much older than most of the people there. We played Providence a lot, Albany once, North Hampton, and another show in NYC at ABC No Rio. And we did tour across the States a couple of times, but that was mostly camping out with shows that were a thousand miles apart. We had a few on the West Coast between Los Angeles and Portland. We played Minneapolis and Buffalo. And we opened for the Orthotonics in Richmond, VA after a show in Chicago. There was a huge crowd that kind of hated us, particularly a really angry German dude who after the gig let Dawn know how exactly brutally offended he was by "Rape Poem." At least we got to play Richmond, stay with Michael Hurley for a couple of days, and have a great time in an amazing swimming hole with Rebby Sharp.

Byron: Where did the Bimbo Shrineheads name come from?

Joe: It was something our late friend Rob McDonald blurted out while we were watching the tv news. Around that time George HW Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate, and Rob said, “He’s a Bimbo Shrinehead, just like Vanna White.”

Byron: So you’re named after Dan Quayle?

Joe: Yeah, or Vanna White. But I have no problem with Vanna White. I just really didn’t like the name Eclectic Bitch, so we compromised and settled on the Bimbo Shrineheads. Eclectic Bitch grew out of a regrettable joke I made when dawn and I were first hanging out and she was hoping to find people to start a band. dawn was describing how her dream band combined feminism and political revolution with poetry, theater and a wide variety of music; everything from jazz to folk to rap to reggae to heavy punk rock mixed with Segovia. I teased her that she should call her band Eclectic Bitch, sarcastically suggesting she reclaim the word "bitch" as an act of empowerment. She should have punched me in the face, but instead took a liking to it. I would have preferred getting punched.

Byron: Why did the name keep mutating?

Joe: We never really liked any of our names, including Bimbo Shrineheads and Shrinnirs. We figured we didn’t have any kind of following so it wouldn't matter. We've been kicking around the idea of changing it again, but with all the time and money Josh has put into this singles collection, we should probably stick with Shrinnirs for now.

Byron: Did the band start up before the Tulpa label?

Joe: The band came first.

Byron: How many releases did you end doing on Tulpa?

Joe: Not many,

Byron: Must have been about 15.

Joe: Yeah. The Flaherty/Colbourne stuff was about the end of it. There was a Footprints 4 comp that never came out. That had Sun City Girls, Galloping Coroners, Snake River and Brian Johnson. Snake River were from Michigan. They had submitted music to Tulpa. Brian Johnson ran an art gallery in Hartford. He played percussion for Vernon Fraser. dawn modeled for the cover of Vernon’s album Sex Queen of the Berlin Turnpike. I think the Sun City Girls and Coroners stuff eventually came out on other labels. I’m going to put out a Colbourne/Flaherty recording with Mike Roberson on guitar soon on my Withdrawn Records label. We released a live Shrin 7” in 1997 with artwork stolen from an Alan Lomax Columbia World Music LP. The covers were hand stamped "Withdrawn" to look like the deacquisitioned records we bought from library sales. Since I still had the stamp, I used it a few years later when I gave out cd-r mixes of some of my 78s to a few friends, and when I put out Randy Colbourne's Clarinet Works recording.

Byron: What was Tulpa named after?

Joe: The name grew out of a discussion with Joey Zone, a graphic artist from Willimantic. It wasn’t named after the Magazine song.

Josh: What does it mean?

Joe: Joey Zone described it as being like a doppelganger, an evil spirit twin who does your dirty work for you. A year or so after the first Tulpa record release Joey gave me a tulpa themed Detective Comic and a Tulpa logo he put together. I've since learned a tulpa is quite a bit different than my understanding of a doppelganger, but at the time my knowledge of Tibetan mysticism was largely limited to what I picked up from UNESCO LPs and Batman comic books.

Josh: How did you get together with Flaherty?

Joe: It was through Rob McDonald. I'm not sure how Rob came in to contact with Flaherty. Paul may have mailed a Flaherty/Colbourne record to the Populous Pudding. It was right around the time of their first Cadence LP. Rob thought I would be into what Paul and Randy were doing, and he was right. They had no gigs. They either played under bridges in Hartford or they would sneak in to the UCONN Art building. When security would come in, Paul would claim he was an art instructor. He completely played the part. I remember an art student pretentiously critiquing the music and offering the advice, “Sometimes less is more.” And Paul said, “No. More is more.” Bimbo Shrineheads had a song with lyrics from a book of words and drawings Paul Flaherty self-published about 20 years ago. dawn pulled the lyrics to the song "Corporate Prostitute" out of there. I think the title of the book was The Corporate Bored. I loaned out my copy and never saw it again. Flaherty claims to be out of stock, but maybe he could dig one up for you. He wrote it while working at one of the Hartford insurance companies before he started painting houses.

Byron: The records you did with those guys put them on the map in a whole new way. For a lot of people that was some of the first free jazz they’d ever heard.

Joe: Aside from the Tulpa comp, Kevin Kraynick helped spread the word, when he featured Flaherty/Colbourne in Damp Magazine. Rob McDonald and I booked Paul and Randy at the Populous Pudding whenever we could. It didn't matter what the other bands on the bill were like. The Pudding was an arts and music collective located in an old fur locker, basically a loud cement box with a single entrance/exit, large bank vault type door. It was a dangerous violation of fire codes, and the perfect setting for Flaherty/Colbourne. They were stunning. Every gig transcendent. Unbelievable.

Byron: What was dawn’s stuff like when she was a folkie?

Joe: She had just started writing originals shortly before we began playing together. It seemed like she was listening to that Silly Sisters album whenever I went over her house, just a huge Maddy Prior fan, but she mostly performed Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Ralph McTell and Buffy Sainte Marie covers. She had the Wobbly songbook. She also had learned a lot of Irish traditionals from singing with her friend Gordon MacDonald. She also covered a lot of Joan Baez. Once we started playing the Populous Pudding, Charlie Krich saw her and Charlie would give her sheet music and order her to learn other Buffy Saint Marie songs: "Here, play Cod'ine next show."

Josh: She could read music?

Joe: Yeah, a little bit, just enough to struggle through working out the chords.

Josh: I remember she was into that first Ricky Lee Jones album.

Joe: The first time I played with her, she used to play coffeehouses all the time, and this was a coffeehouse type setting. She came in with her untuneable electric guitar and I had an industrial oil barrel like Neubauten or something. And we played "I Will Die in Willimantic", "Slabs of Stone", and Dylan's "Masters of War". It was funny to witness the reaction. It was not what people wanted to hear. Actually I'd rather hear dawn solo on acoustic guitar, too. Whether playing folk standards or her own songs, everything sounds better when she slows things down and plays and sings solo. She knocks me out at times. I've always felt lucky that she puts up with me.

Byron: How did your Swedish release come about?

Joe: A Swedish band mailed a tape and wanted Tulpa to put out a record. I think they’d read about us in Maximum Rock & Roll. We decided to do a split. I’ve never met them, I don’t think they’ve ever been to the States. It was a co-release with Fetvadd in Sweden. But 16 B.U.H. sent the material hoping one of the bands on the first Footprints comp would want to do a split.

Josh: Did they have other releases?

Joe: Yeah, they have a few albums out.

Byron: What happened to the proposed Twisted Village LP?

Joe: It was mostly live to cassette recordings from various basements. On some of the songs dawn had home made contact microphones taped onto her bouzouki and balalaika and it sounds like it’s really noise genre stuff, but it’s just her pulling the mic off and retaping it. I was never sure if Wayne & Kate, from Twisted Village, were just being nice because we were friends or what, so I never pushed them on getting the record out. I put together the tape and I couldn’t tell if they were genuinely enthusiastic or not. After a while it just fell by the wayside.

Byron: Some of that’s what got recycled on Limnal Switch?

Joe: Yeah.

Josh: What about that Twisted Village compilation on Shock?

Joe: Wayne put that together when we were talking about releasing an album on Twisted Village. He used a song from one of our old 7" eps. His mix is better than the original. Stefan, from Shock, hates that track. He was pissed our song ending up on his label. He just doesn’t like that kind of music.

Josh: But for a lot of people, that’s how they first heard about the band.

Byron: You were in Wormdoom also.

Joe: Yeah, that was around ’95.

Byron: How many gigs did Wormdoom play?

Joe: Two. Twisted Village had just opened as a store and we did one there to celebrate and one out here at the Amherst Unitarian Church with Flaherty/Colbourne.

Byron: Were there plans for more shows?

Joe: I would have liked to play more, but Wayne & Kate were busy with Magic Hour and the new store.

Josh: I played on the Wormdoom album, too. It was just basement jam stuff.

Byron: Did they credit you?

Josh: There were no credits. It’s the same with that B.O.R.B In Orbit CD. There were no credits on that either.

Byron: Are you on any of this stuff, Joe?

Joe: I’m on some of the Vermonster stuff.

Josh: You might be on that B.O.R.B. CD, too. That was just basement jams too.

Joe: I don't think I'm any of the B.O.R.B. stuff, but the band did make nice use of my Radio Shack Moog. Josh and I played on some of the last Crystalized Movements gigs. We played CBGB.

Josh: That was the only time I ever played there.

Joe: And Providence and...I think there were three shows.

Byron: That must have been when they were more together. Their early shows featured a lot of tuning.

Joe: Bimbo Shrineheads did a lot of that too. We got tired of it and started doing entire sets with no breaks at all. Saving up to buy Dawn guitars that would hold a tuning was the key.

Byron: Were you still doing songs?

Joe: We’d have five short songs in a row, but we would leave spots open to improvise if we felt inclined, then we’d play some more songs. We were back to the duo line-up by then. Sometimes Josh would join us at the end when we played in Cambridge. He would play sax and dawn would sing in to an mbira plugged in to the distortion pedals on her guitar amp. She often used an old throat mic built for airplane pilots and ran that through her amp, too. It looked like a beat up leather choker around her neck. That was probably '93 to '95.

Byron: What was the worst band you ever played with?

Josh: Maybe the Reverb Motherfuckers. That show was not a very good. They played for like two hours.

Byron: What was your best gig?

Josh: I remember a really good one at the Middle East.

Joe: I think Fire in the Kitchen headlined the show you are thinking of. Steve Erickson, from Cut 'Zine, put that bill together with Billy Ruane.

Josh: That was great that night. Fire in the Kitchen were a much better live band than their records ever let on.

Byron: What was the horrible show in Worcester I’ve heard you refer to?

Joe: That was with Eugene Chadbourne at the Worcester Artists Group in ‘91, but we had plenty of other horrible shows. Chadbourne was great. We were terrible. We spent too much time creating our most elaborate props ever for performance pieces. dawn worked very hard on set design and stagecraft for that gig. We suffered technical problems throughout. It stifled the music. After that show we cut way back on props and slide shows. That freed us to just go up and play with room for improvisation when we felt like it. dawn still did things like occasionally shave off chunks of her hair on stage, but we left the slide shows and most of the props at home. It was also disappointing because we had just started playing with Jeff LeDoux on guitar and vocals. He fit in perfectly from the very first practice. That one bad show with Chadbourne was Jeff's only show with us. A few days after, he broke the news that he was following his girlfriend to Minneapolis.

Byron: What happened to the scene in Willimantic? Everyone just move away?

Joe: Pretty much, but not entirely. There was punk rock music in Willimantic long before the Populous Pudding, and today there are still dedicated people putting on art and music shows in empty Main Street store fronts. After the Populous Pudding closed, Charlie Krich started doing shows in his basement. Charlie had initially gotten involved in the Pudding as an outlet for his poetry. He didn't seem to have had much contact with punk rock prior to the Pudding, but maybe I'm wrong in assuming that. The enthusiasm and DIY spirit of the touring bands impressed him. He’s a human rights lawyer with a beautiful old Victorian home which he opened up to a young crowd of hardcore bands and underground music fans. After a while there were too many noise complaints, so he worked with Jay Forklift and a few of the other kids to open the Willimantic Arts Collective. That space didn't last long. They had better luck with the landlord and police in Studio 158, which they founded soon after. It a was great place for shows. Charlie is an extremely generous and humble guy who truly deserved the Saint Chuck and SuperChuck nicknames the kids gave him. A lot of younger folks were shaped by Charlie’s shows – throughout the early ‘90s he was booking hardcore punk and all that. He had Green Day at the Norwich VFW. We played there with Spitboy. We opened an Econochrist show Charlie helped a kid put together in a condominium complex in Manchester. At Studio 158 we played with Bikini Kill, Universal Order of Armageddon, Avail, Devoid of Faith and a bunch of other touring bands, as well as local friends like Mi6.

Byron: How did it go over when you played with punk bands.

Joe: Usually confusion.

Josh: But I’ve also heard over the years that there were people who really got changed by seeing you. It was beyond their comprehension at the time, but it made them realize there was something else possible.

Joe: But a lot of the young guys were really intimidated by dawn too. They didn’t know what to make of her face paint or whatever. She could sometimes lose herself and unknowingly glare intensely at people while she played. She scared some of the boys. Overall, it seemed like we were tolerated. There was a difference between our earliest shows in the 1980s and the shows say '92 to '95. In the 80s a faceless male voice from deep in the crowd would often heckle. After about 1992, we didn't get much of a reaction. For the most part, people sat on the floor, politely clapped, and waited for our set to end. I know dawn is always surprised when women tell her things like how they were effected by seeing her chop up her hair or when people speak about certain songs and shows from years ago.

Josh: On one of the songs she’d just scream for like ten minutes. It was her anti-child abuse song, “Mother Goose and Mr. Hyde". Even severe hardcore bands were not that severe.

Joe: We did it one time on WRIU radio and it was just psychodrama. I don’t know what the kids at the radio station thought. Listening to the tape, I can hear why Josh left the live version off this collection. The words and visceral screaming can be a stomach sickening bum out to hear, and musically it is a mess since my drum kit actually fell apart, but I thought the live radio recording was one of the most accurate documents of what we were doing.

Byron: Where was the gig you were supposed to open for Suckdog & Costes?

Joe: That was at UCONN. Lisa called the promoter to say they were delayed. Costes had jumped out of their car and runaway. The promoter kept coming up on stage and whispering, “Play more.” I think that was my least favorite show along with the time in Chicago when I cracked my head on a low hanging monitor and later puked between songs. My favorite show was the one in New Haven where we got kicked off before we even finished the first tune.

Josh: We played at this diner, opening for St. Johnny.

Joe: Who didn’t even play. The owner said, “If you’re like them, here’s $25, just go away.”

Josh: We played one song and they turned the mics off and turned the jukebox on really loud. There was no one there anyway.

Byron: And then you left Willimantic, rendering your best known song more or less untrue.

Joe: We’ll see.

Byron: You went to Boston.

Joe: Yeah, for 14 years and then New Haven. Boston got too expensive so I moved. And dawn went to Worcester to go to school. Now she’s in Manchester, CT.

Byron: Do you guys have any plans to play more?

Joe: Well, if people ask us we’ll play. dawn loves playing out. I prefer jamming in her art studio. We haven't played music together much over the last few years. I'll play out if that is what it takes to get her motivated.

Byron: Can they pick the line-up that plays?

Joe: Maybe.

Byron: Has dawn done any musical stuff subsequently?

Joe: Not much.

Josh: She paints.

Byron: But she didn’t go back to her folk roots?

Joe: No.

Byron: You kind of ruined that forever.

Joe: I hope so.

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