Jonathan Drexler and Will Dalgard (end)

The last time I saw Will also happens to be the last time I saw Jonathan Drexler. It was November 2002, and Will was back in Dayton working at Picadilly Pizza over on North Dixie. He organized a show one night on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and he called all his friends who gladly came out and played. I don't remember the whole lineup, but I know ALTERED STATESMEN played and JACKALOPES played. Of course, I played, and there were about a dozen others. Jonathan and his brother Hans had a new band at the time called MY SECRET SERVICE. They were living in Chicago, but they came down to play some songs because Will asked them to (and maybe also because they were in town for Thanksgiving anyway).

Will asked many of us, including Jonathan, Hans, and I, to come down to the restaurant a couple hours early to eat some free pizza and watch EVIL DEAD 2 (one of the greatest gore films of all time, and one of the very few sequels that is even better than the original). It was his way of getting the old group that used to watch shitty horror movies in his shitty apartment back when he was sober to get together one more time. And it was great. We sat there and watched the movie and made stupid comments. Will didn't have one drink, and we all had a good time, just like we used to.

I played fairly early, and as the other bands went on, I found myself mostly standing just outside the front door smoking. Jonathan and Hans were scheduled to go on last, so I spent a lot of time talking to them. After an hour or so, I caught Jonathan sort of keeping an eye on Will as Will went in and out, making sure the bands could get their gear in and out, and announcing each act.

Jonathan seemed to be giving Will a lot of extra scrutiny, and whenever Will passed by, Jonathan would make a face. So I asked him about it. And he just sort of shrugged and told me he'd noticed Will had disappeared for a while with a person that we all knew to be a notorious drug dealer. We didn't know exactly what Will took, but as the night wore on, it became more and more obvious that it was a little more powerful than a bag of Acapulco Gold.

Over the next hour, things just went to hell. Will had a lot of trouble walking, his speech became increasingly nonsensical, the band introductions just got bizarre. Finally, at about midnight Will took the stage to play a brief set before Jonathan and Hans were supposed to play. I had been looking forward to that all night. I hadn't heard Will play solo since 1990, and I had nothing but hope that it would be just like the old days.

It was a fucking train wreck. I'd seen lots of bands play drunk before, but I had never seen anyone make a bigger ass of himself as much as he did that night. He couldn't finish songs he'd been playing for ten years. He was wheeling about randomly, getting tangled up in cables. People would try to help him, and his responses ranged from profusely apologetic to total belligerence, sometimes to the same person in the space of a few seconds.

Jonathan and Hans and I had stood there all night watching this happen. And as Will stumbled around in there, Jonathan just sort of shook his head. Without a word, he and his brother quietly went into the place and gathered up their equipment. I watched them pack it in the car. I don't remember exactly what Jonathan said to me as he shook my hand, but it was something to the effect that he couldn't watch this anymore.

Jonathan had the bad luck to meet Will when Will was sober. So did I, and so did a lot of other people. We caught our first impressions of him in that five-year period between his last drink and his next one. In that time he could be annoying and bitter and sometimes dishonest and always obsessive. But he was also focused and genuinely humble and often reliable and always sober. We made fun of those long rants he would deliver during PLANET ED shows, but I think he knew we also admired the guts he had to stand up there and do it. Nobody else was really doing that at the time, and whatever anyone thought of it when the show was over, when Will was talking, people were listening. They were paying attention. That's all any artist wants.

A few weeks after PLANET ED broke up, Will started drinking again. I remember going over to his apartment one day to work on some 4-track stuff with him, and he had an open forty of Milwaukee's Best sitting on the table. We talked about it a little bit, and then we did some recording. That was 1992.

As Jonathan and Hans drove away, I thought I might go back into the restaurant to see how this all might play out. But instead I just passed the door and went to my car. I remember looking through the window and seeing that Will was on the floor.

That was the last time I saw Will but not the last time I talked to him. Over the next decade, he would call me three or four times a year, and we e-mailed back and forth often. He drifted from Dayton to Portland to San Francisco to (I think) Washington, DC and maybe to New York for a while. Every so often he would go to rehab. But it never worked.

At the beginning of this post, I said that we lost Jonathan back in February and Will died last week. I choose my words carefully, and those two different verbs are exactly what I meant. We lost Jonathan this year. But Will? We lost him twenty years ago, and we've all just been watching him die since then. Last week he did it -- finally.

When you spend two decades watching someone you care about kill himself, you have a lot of time to feel a lot of things about it. It's frustrating, it's painful, and it makes you very, very angry.

But eventually there comes a time when even frustration is no longer frustrating. The pain doesn't really hurt that much. And the anger doesn't make you very mad anymore. You still feel those things, but it gets more and more like you're just watching yourself feel them. Or maybe it's simpler than that: maybe you don't feel those things at all. You just really, really wish you did.

To put it even more simply, you lose hope. I lost hope in Will. It didn't happen that night at Picadilly Pizza. I don't know when it happened, but five minutes after I learned he was dead, I knew it had happened some time ago. And it wasn't an epiphany or a moment of clarity or something else St. Luke or Sherwood Anderson or Bill W. would write about. It was more like a... "hey... I lost hope... how 'bout that?"

Jello Biafra, one of Will's idols, tells a great story about how he ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979 (to fill the office left vacant by George Moscone, who had been assassinated along with Harvey Milk the previous year). At the end of the story, he talks about how before that campaign he had often had doubts about his career as a musician -- that he wasn't a good singer, that his lyrics weren't as good as Iggy Pop's or Jim Morrison's. But after that he realized he had just done something that none of the artist's he looked up to had ever done, so he felt more confident about his career.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a short story for my English class that the teacher liked so much he read it out loud to the entire class, and then we all talked about it for twenty minutes. I remember being pretty embarrassed by that but also thrilled. It was the first time I remember having any positive indication that I might have some talent for telling stories, something I had wanted to do since I looked at the pictures in Spider-Man comics, years before I could even read.

Just about everybody has those moments like Jello Biafra and I had, moments when we figure out that we might not be quite so bad at something as we thought we were, when we realize we might have somehow inexplicably stumbled onto something we're good at, when the evidence shows that we can do it. Just about everybody has a few dozen moments like that over a lifetime. Those moments keep us going. They are the only reason we do anything more than throw shit at each other all the time because those are the moments that give us hope.

I don't think Will ever had one moment like that in his whole life. Don't get me wrong: he had a talent for music, he had a talent for entertaining, he had all sorts of talents that he carried around with him all the time, I'm sure right up to the moment he died. But he took no comfort, no hope from any of it.

And he didn't lack those moments because he was an addict. The one constant between drunk Will and sober Will is that he never truly believed in a better future for himself. And he was not an addict because he lacked hope. There are plenty of addicts out there who have enormous faith in themselves. Will was just a drunk, and he was hopeless.

And like Jonathan, I couldn't look at it anymore. As much as it saddens me that he's gone, I'm glad that I don't have to look at it anymore. I have about a thousand words in a notepad file that I'd like to work in here about all this, but I'm tired of thinking about it. And I won't spend any more of your or my time on him.

take care,

---Patrick

Jonathan Drexler and Will Dalgard

A few months ago we lost Jonathan Drexler. In that time I have wanted to say something about him on this blog. The night I learned about it, I opened up a blank notepad file and put down a few words. But after a paragraph or two, no more words came. And every two or three weeks since then I've tried the same -- and always had the same results. There's a particular story I've wanted to tell about the last time I saw him, but although I have half a dozen files open with different starts, I still haven't been able to put it in a form that I'm satisfied with. I just didn't know what to say. Going on five months now, and I still didn't know what to say -- until now.

A few days ago Will Dalgard died. I didn't know until a few hours ago. My ex-wife called to tell me about it, and my girlfriend brought it to my attention later, because neither one of them thought I should hear about it in somebody's Facebook status update. Y'know what? It took me all of five seconds to figure out what I want to say about him. Here it is:

I wish I'd never met Will Dalgard. I wish I'd never known him. I am a poorer person for having known him. I can't think of anyone else I've ever met that I would say that about -- and just to put that in perspective, I worked in a prison for ten years. I wish I'd never met him. I wish I had never met him.

If that angers you, I get it. It's a terrible thing to say about a person, especially when he's just died. But if you are angered by it, then you didn't know Will. You didn't know him. You didn't know what he thought of himself. If at some point in his life Will could have looked into the future and read every mean thing I'm about to say about him, he would've smiled and said, "That's the worst you can do? Because I've got some stories..."

Will always had a story. He had the story about how he and Dave Matusof ran away from the crazy redneck who wanted to kill them. He had the story about Allison Davis, the girl who broke his heart. He had stories about his landlord and Metallica concerts and bands he was in and girls he dated and shitty jobs he had and the navy he got kicked out of and times he got beat up. He had the story about how I loaned him money to pay his rent, and when he had enough to pay me back he bought a Fender Mustang instead. He always had a story. And right now I feel like he told me every last one of them, and I wish I'd never let him open his mouth. But I did. I let him talk, and I listened, and there's no changing that now.

Will was a storyteller. If you knew him, you knew that. Everybody knew it. How many times did we sit there and listen to him tell some long rambling story from his shitty, stupid life? Sometimes it was in a room with a few "friends" (if Will ever really had "friends" in the literal sense -- I don't think he did). Sometimes it was in a bar with him strumming an acoustic guitar. The ones that are most vivid to me are the ones he told while Dave Graeter and I kept up a monotonous beat in one of his songs with an interminable musical break so he could go on and on and on about whatever he was going on and on and on about.

I've reported one or two of his stories here on this blog. And I've posted a couple of recordings with more of those stories. And as an undeserved favor to Will, I will recount another story that springs to mind at this moment.

About twelve or thirteen years ago, Will was back in Dayton and living in a crappy one bedroom apartment above some storefronts near the corner of Wayne and Wyoming (that building has since been destroyed). I visited him there one night. He showed me a new amplifier and Les Paul that he had somehow acquired and played me a few tunes he was working on. I then noticed a copy of his General Discharge from the United States Navy hanging on the wall. Yes, he hung his "General" discharge on his wall.

He told me that he had loved his time in the navy at first, but it didn't take him long to get restless. He wanted out, so while he was stationed on some ship off the coast of Africa, he went to his commanding officer and said, "Sir! Regulations require that I report any navy personnel dealing federally controlled substances on the ship, SIR!" His CO said, "Of course! Would you like to report someone, Seaman Dalgard?" And Will replied, "Yes sir! I would like to report myself."

He was selling weed on the ship. He reported himself. They booted him. That's the story he told me, and it was all true as far as I know. Will Dalgard was a storyteller.

Will Dalgard was also an addict. He was addicted to everything you could possibly think of. He was addicted to alcohol. He was addicted to drugs. He was addicted to talking and being, and he was addicted to himself and everyone else on the face of the earth. Will Dalgard was bright and talented. He was warm, and he wanted everything to work out well for everybody. He might be the most enthusiastic person I've ever known. He was a human treasure. And he was an addict.

And addicts will always find a way to negate all that nice stuff I just said (like about Will being a "treasure" and such). Addicts will always find a way to do that. But they don't find it because they lack willpower or because they are stupid or because they are any less valuable than anyone else. They just find it. They just do. They disappoint us. That's what addicts do. In essence, it is the only thing they do.

Unfortunately, it just occurred to me that it's a quarter after four in the morning, and there's no way I'm going to finish this tonight. So I'm posting this first part. And tomorrow I'm going to post the rest.

Will was a storyteller, and so am I. And I've got one more story about him and Jonathan Drexler that should be told.

take care,

---Jones()

THE KILLJOYS (a.k.a. THE RAGING MANTRAS), Will (promo cassette, 1989)

NICK KIZIRNIS (who played guitar in THE KILLJOYS/RAGING MANTRAS) is playing a solo gig tomorrow night at Therapy. Show starts at 9 p.m.

Okay, if you want to skip my rant about snow, weather, and stupid people, just scroll down until you see the list of band members.

Let me guess: it's snowing like a motherfucker and you're stuck inside desperately browsing the web for something to keep your mind off the fact that you won't be able to go anywhere tonight or, if you're at work, that you still have to drive home in this shit?

Maybe I'm wrong about all that, but I, for one, am getting a little tired of this snow bullshit. Maybe it's global warming as Al Gore would have us believe (and I agree) or maybe it's god deciding to fuck with Ohio (and who could blame him?) or maybe it's the all-pervasive aura of crap and bad times that has always seemed to saturate this area, but whatever the reason, the weather around here is totally fucking off and has been for years now. Three days ago we had a monsoon -- today, a blizzard.

And I'm not going to be able to drive up to school tonight for Business Associations class. Oh yeah, did I mention that law schools never ever close for weather? Seriously. I mean, they do close sometimes, but in the last two and a half years, I remember Capital closing for weather exactly once -- and that was under far worse conditions than this. Maybe it's the bar's way of thinning the glut of lawyers that law schools produce -- I mean, 35% of the people who started with me have already dropped out, and apparently that's only a little more than typical (I think the national average is 25% or thereabouts). For the 60% remaining, maybe the bar figures they can cut that down if we have to make repeated death-defying journeys through mountains of snow all the time. Who knows?

But it's not really the weather or the driving or the shovelling that really crimps my dick, it's the way Daytonians react to the possibility of a few flakes of snow as if they are heralds of the apocalypse. No shit, people around here go absolutely insane with fear right before we get snow. The news today advised people to pick up ten gallons of water per day per person in the house! I went to the grocery store this morning to pick up some cat food, and as usual I found it jam packed with people grabbing snow shovels and filling up carts with groceries. I don't quite understand that. I mean, we've had some bad snow in the past, but at its worst, I don't remember being stuck in the house for more than a day, maybe two at most.

Yet people are stocking enough groceries for a week. I don't understand why they do that. Do they think we'll all be trapped in our houses for that long, even though it's meteorogically impossible for Ohio to get that much snow? Do they just not keep enough groceries on hand to last more than half a day? Is there something about snow that commands Americans to consume 200% more than the oversized portion of the world's resources that they consumer already? Fuck.

But what the hell? It's for exactly times like this that I save up the best treats to be found among our (meaning Grog's, Gail's, and my) collections of Gem City Arcana. This one comes from my bag of tricks. Let's do it:

THE KILLJOYS were:

Rob Schaefer - bass, vocals
Jim MacPherson - drums
Ed Lacy - keyboards
Nick Kizirnis - guitars, vocals
Gregg Spence - guitars, vocals

Gregg is not credited on any of the materials included on this tape (because he didn't usually play live with these guys), but I know he at least played some guitar on it (listen for the clean Rickenbacker -- all distorted guitars and all leads are by Nick), and I'm pretty sure he supplied some backing vocals.

The cassette is a Maxell UR 60 that Nick Kizirnis gave me long ago. The info sheet says the tape contains an "advance excerpt" from a planned full-length release called Will, but I'm pretty sure this is more than just an excerpt. Although Nick wrote the titles of only five songs on the insert, the tape actually contains eight. I'm pretty sure that's everything they recorded for Will.

Here's what the band has to say on the info sheet that came with this cassette:

Formed early in 1987, the Killjoys have been playing in the Dayton and Cincinnati areas and plan to release an all original cassette, entitled Will, early in 1990. The band has been called alternative/progressive rock, and are known for their strong live shows.

The Killjoys play original songs, though they will torture songs by the Jet Black Berries and True West, as well as pieces by other alternative/college oriented (whatever that means) bands.

The Killjoys are Rob Schaefer (bass and vocals), Jim MacPherson (drums), Ed Lacy (keyboards), and Nick Kizirnis (guitars and vocals). All four have been previously involved in other musical projects in the Dayton area. They are now playing in the midwest and promoting their upcoming cassette. The enclosed cassette is an advance excerpt from Will.

I've never seen a production copy of Will. THE KILLJOYS circulated tapes like this among radio stations, clubs, and friends for promotional purposes before Will was released. As I said, the tape is consumer branded, and came with an information sheet folded in a way so as to be slipped into the cassette case displaying part of a picture of the band (taken at Canal Street Tavern) through the front of the box. A scan of the sheet containing the full picture is included in the download package. Sorry about the fold lines, but it had been sitting in the cassette case folded up like that for fifteen years before I scanned it.

After changing their name to THE RAGING MANTRAS, this band released another cassette in 1991 called Fish Head Test Monkey Music (which may have been the first official release on Big Beef Records, but only Andy Valeri would know for sure).

I must've seen THE KILLJOYS dozens of times between 1988 and 1992, before and after they changed their name to THE RAGING MANTRAS (because, according to Ed, there were already too many other things named "Killjoy" at the time). Both THE OXYMORONS and PLANET ED played with them many times, and all of us got be fairly good friends. They were the only band that ever got me to dance (that includes DEMENTIA PRECOX -- much as I love 'em). Long before Nick gave me this cassette, all these tunes were pretty well burned into my brain just through seeing them live.

Rob Schaefer was a very tall guy with long hair, glasses, and huge hands for bass playing (Gail used to say he looked like a Teddy Graham from far away if you squinted right). As I remember, he was more or less the dominant creative force behind most of what THE KILLJOYS did. My impression is that Nick, Rob, Ed, and Jim contributed pretty much equally to the music and the whole theatrical thing that came with this band, but Rob had the most input overall and seemed to write most of the lyrics (if one of the band members would like to correct me on that, they should feel free). His day job at the time was as a manager at the famous Rock'n'Roll Kinko's on Brown Street (so called because pretty much every band in Dayton went there to get flyers done -- usually while Rob was working). After THE RAGING MANTRAS broke up, I believe he pursued that career full time. The last time I saw him was in 1994. Jen Cook and I came to Kinko's to get COLAVISION flyers copied. We talked for a while, and I never saw him again. I don't know where he is today.

Chances are you already know as much as I could tell you about Jim MacPherson, but for clarity's sake, here are the basics: he played drums in this band and, at that time, had a bigger kit (eight or nine pieces, I think) than he would later use in THE BREEDERS. Jim wrote the lyrics for "Spaceman Jack" and maybe others. He had been in one or two bands prior to THE KILLJOYS. This interview with Jim MacPherson briefly discusses (among other things) how Jim came to leave THE RAGING MANTRAS and join THE BREEDERS. He played drums for a number of bands later, including REAL LULU and GUIDED BY VOICES. Find out more at his Wikipedia entry.

Ed Lacy is in my top five most intelligent people I've ever known (specifically, he's number three -- edged out of the top spots only by my genius older brother and my super-genius high school buddy Kris Pleis). He can talk politics, music, art, literature, and science in a genuinely engaging way (a rare talent among the super intelligent). He can appreciate the complexities of life's big abstractions as well as the significance of the seemingly mundane. Ed was entering his thirties at the time of THE KILLJOYS' heyday (if they had a heyday), so he already had a bit more history to speak of among the punk and alt-rock subcultures than the rest of us. Apparently, in his youth, Ed was fond of pulling public theater type pranks like showing up to greet Ronald Reagan while he was on the campaign trail in 1980: dressed in a Nazi SS uniform and just standing their silently the entire time with one arm outstretched in Zeig-Heil style. In my entire life, I don't think I've ever done anything that cool -- Ed was doing stuff like that as a teenager.

After THE RAGING MANTRAS, Ed played in CAGE (with Nick Kizirnis), THE LAWN JOCKEYS, and a number of others. I remember several occasions over the years in which he and I would talk about playing some music together (most recently, in 2003 when I wanted him to play piano for a cover of "Christmastime Is Here" at THE VECTORS CD-giveaway Christmas show), but we never got around to doing it.

Throughout his time playing in Dayton bands, Ed was also a substitute and later a full-time teacher for Dayton Public Schools, but he got out of that a few years ago. Until 2005, when he finally shook the dust of Dayton off his feet and moved to Florida, he worked with a former friend (and Angelle Gullet) at Mazer. I'm not sure what Ed is doing musically or professionally now.

One last thing on Ed: for those who don't know, yes, he is the "Ed" after which my old band PLANET ED was named.

I'll have more to say about Nick Kizirnis when I post on THE OBVIOUS (his first band), but for now, I'll just say he's an all around great guy with a distinguished history playing music around these parts. After THE RAGING MANTRAS, he formed CAGE (indie rock combo which also included Ed Lacy, Matt Espy, and Gregg Spence) and THE MULCHMEN (surf-rock, with Gregg Spence and Brian Hogarth), both of which broke up in the mid-'90s. More recently, he played with THE JET AGE (which included former members of OO OO WA, among others) but quit that band in 2004 (I think). Later that year, he released a solo album called Into the Loud, which is available from Atom Records and through Nick's web site. Today, his band NICKY KAY AND HIS FABULOUS KAY-TONES is currently on hiatus, but here's hoping they get back together soon. Most recently, I saw him play with a kids music band (the man can play anything) at the Greene around Halloween 2007. You can catch him solo tomorrow night (Saturday, March 7, 2008) at Therapy on Third Street here in town.

If I could play in a band with any Dayton musician right now, it would be Nick Kizirnis.

Big Beef Records produced a two hour RAGING MANTRAS live video available at this link (it's near the bottom of the page, so you'll have to scroll down a ways). The video pretty much captures the full-blown RAGING MANTRAS multi-media stage show (accurately described in the write up on the video).

Will Dalgard roadied for these guys extensively, so I think he should get a little credit for making this music possible.

Okay, this post has become a monster, and I want to save a few things to say for when I post THE RAGING MANTRAS other cassette, Fish Head Test Monkey Music. So just a few track notes before we get to the download:

• The music is actually better classed as prog-rock, rather than indie rock (I always thought of these guys as kind of like a slicker-sounding PERE UBU or CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN with longer and more complex arrangements). This was before the big local music explosion of 1994, and at that time Dayton had a far smaller number of bands than it does today. So out of necessity, bands of widely varying genres would end up on the same bill. It wasn't uncommon to see punk from THE OXYMORONS or THE OBVIOUS on the same bill as R&B from TOOBA BLOOZE, new wave from THE PLEASURES PALE, dance-pop from DEMENTIA PRECOX, or prog-rock from THE KILLJOYS.
• I believe "Spaceman Jack" is about a hunting accident Jim had once.
• The dialogue in the middle of "Nightstick" is spoken by Nick Kizirnis (as the cop) and Ed Lacy (as the motorist). This was always my favorite KILLJOYS song, and I'm pretty sure it was a favorite with Ben, Nick, and Grog too. THE OXYMORONS used to make a habit of spontaneously launching into a mangled rendition of the last few bars of "Nightstick" whenever we felt like it.
• Gail has lent me a tape that includes DOBIE WILLIS covering "I Pledge" at a Musician's Co-Op show that is simply priceless (the same tape also contains a solo set by Nick Kizirnis -- will post the whole thing soon).
• My only complaint about this tape is that "Dance of the Thundergods" does not include the spoken-word "Hermaphrodite Story" that Rob used to tell as an intro when THE KILLJOYS played it live. Although I have no recording of Rob telling that story, I do have a recording of Ben doing a hilarious parody of it at an OXYMORONS practice.
• For gee-tar geeks, I'm pretty sure Nick was using a Les Paul with a Rat Pedal and a Roland Jazz Chorus for most of this (Nick, correct me if I'm wrong -- I've played guitar for twenty-four years, but I'm still pretty clueless about guitar equipment).
• All these songs were recorded at the Cro-Magnon studios in its original location on the opposite side of the Front Street Warehouse from where it later moved in the early '90s. At that time Cro-Mag was 8 tracks.
• All these songs were engineered by Joe Buben.

Track List:

1. Spaceman Jack
2. Raging Heart
3. Nightstick
4. I Pledge
5. When Will It Come?
6. Dance of the Thundergods
7. Diseases of the Tongue
8. Nothing New

Download It! (52 MB) (link re-upped 2-1-2013)

For some reason, I mis-titled "Diseases of the Tongue" as "Throb" in the download package -- don't know why I did that.

Anyway, download, listen, enjoy (and go see Nick tomorrow night at Therapy, 9 p.m.).

So now I see that they have, in fact, closed the law school. Happy Snow Day!

take care

---Jones()

PLANET ED, Listen and Understand, Earthlings! (7", 1990)

Of any band I've ever been in, PLANET ED was the most emotionally draining, mostly due to the nearly polar opposite personalities of Will and Dave. Those two guys had completely adverse approaches to music, which made for a lot of tension in this band. But all that tension also made for some great shows, great recordings, and great fun overall (at least from my perspective). Looking back on it now, I wouldn't change one thing.

Will had sort of a musical split personality. On the one hand, he liked punk rock. As I said in the DOBIE WILLIS post, he was (still is) an unabashed admirer of JELLO BIAFRA, THE DEAD KENNEDYS, DOA, and THE RAMONES. This is all true. But Will never quite got past his teenage obsession with LED ZEPPELIN, TED NUGENT, and other '70s cock rockers. To be fair, I had a similar obsession in my teenage years, and I never quite got past it either (just last summer I dug up a bunch of BLACK SABBATH tunes and obsessed on them for about a week -- and just in time for Satan Day 2006 (that's 6-6-06 in case you don't get it; and if I'm still alive in June of 2066 I'll be celebrating Satan Month with demonic fervor)).

But Will especially loved '70s-style groove jams: you know, like the 10-minute guitar solo in "Stranglehold" by TED NUGENT and shit like that. Most of the songs he wrote for PLANET ED featured a very long instrumental break, usually filled by Will going off on some Biafra-esque tirade (if you listened to Stand Your Ground you already know what I'm talking about). Will also loved to play incredibly long sets and talk to people while on stage. It didn't bother him too much if we spent a minute or two (or three or four or ten) between songs yelling at people in the crowd or making bad jokes -- like, imagine the FEAR sequence in Decline of Western Civilization (don't make me say Part 1), except less confrontational and less funny.

Dave, on the other hand, loved short fast songs with goofy, down-to-earth lyrics. His idols were SCREECHING WEASEL, CRIMPSHRINE, MR. T EXPERIENCE, GREEN DAY, THE QUEERS, CRINGER, 7 SECONDS, and hundreds (literally hundreds--Dave's record collection was of Bodleian proportions) of other bands that Will used to refer to as "low-grade punk rock" (of course, this was three years before Dookie! would come out and suddenly turn Dave's "low-grade punk rock" into big, BIG business). He couldn't stand long instrumental grooves, and he wanted a very short set and as little time as possible between songs. In Dave Graeter's happy place, the bands all play fifteen songs in ten minutes.

I guess I sort of fell somewhere in the middle--maybe. I mean, I definitely liked short songs, but I also wanted a little more substance in the music than Dave seemed content with. I was also totally obsessed with BOB MOULD and HUSKER DU, so I wanted more emo-type content in there too. So basically, each of us was going in a different direction. We argued. We argued a lot.

One way or another, things always seemed to go wrong for PLANET ED. The majority of horror stories I have about playing shows are from PLANET ED shows. At our "big show" with ROYAL CRESCENT MOB at Canal Street Tavern, the Mob turned out to be total assholes who wanted us off stage in like thirty minutes (so we played for an hour--and even Dave was okay with that). We played Oxford when the snow was 8 inches deep and I had a terrible head cold and we had to wait until 3 a.m. to collect our money (which turned out to be $15). Our planned five-day tour of the midwest fell apart completely at the last minute. I mean, every booking fell through the day we were supposed to leave--after we'd rented the van!

But we kept playing. We kept practicing. We kept making records. Somehow, for the two years we were together, it worked. We argued, but we compromised. We had some lousy shows, but we turned them into great stories. For all the tension, it was fun. And I think we made some good music.

PLANET ED's first release was a cassette entitled Bubblegum for the Masses, a live thing we recorded at Canal Street Tavern. That cassette is sort of a story in itself and best belongs with a post about Canal Street Tavern. Today, I'm sharing our first 7" record, Listen and Understand, Earthlings!

I like this one because I think it shows how each of us kind of set aside our usual preferences and learned something from the others. Although I wrote "Hollywood Erotic," it's really a joke song -- no emo-content whatsoever. "Feelings Turn Colors" is Will's offering, but it's a fairly straight arrangement with only a brief guitar solo and no political ranting. Dave's song "Tension Kid" (which is at least partly about Will) is actually the longest one, and it's even got a groovy instrumental break in the middle.

Track list:

1. Hollywood Erotic
2. Feelings Turn Colors
3. Tension Kid

Download it! (18 MB) (link re-upped on 2-4-2013)

UPDATE 2-4-2013: The download package here is a completely new rip.  The old one was done on a terrible combo-stereo system.  This one is from a much better stereo.

As usual, the download package includes hi-resolution scans of the record and the insert. I think this one came out particularly well. I love Dave's layout on the inner part of the sleeve (the pictures in this entry are details of it), and I think the label on the "Planet Side" of the vinyl is so nice, I'd put it on a t-shirt.

The sample at the beginning of "Feelings Turn Colors" is from Dead Poets' Society. The one in the middle of "Tension Kid" is from Repo Man (which I should really get on DVD some time).

Nick Kizirnis and Nick Atkinson helped with the back-up vocals on "Tension Kid."

Recorded at Cro-Magnon studios. Engineered by Joe Buben.

For the bands I played in, my ultimate wish for this blog has always been to some day dig up all the masters and post better quality recordings. Unfortunately, in PLANET ED's case, this plan will always remain a dream. For some inexplicable reason, Dave and I appointed Will the official keeper of the PLANET ED masters. In typical Dalgard fashion, he lost them years ago (probably traded them for some magic beans). Today's post is from the vinyl. However, Dave tells me he's got a cassette of this stuff that came right from the studio master tapes. When I get that tape from him, I'll post it here.

take care

---Jones

DOBIE WILLIS, Stand Your Ground (cassette, 1991)

If you missed yesterday's "prelude" to this post, I suggest you scroll down one entry and read it before you continue (I'll wait).

Okay? Here we go...

I first met Will Dalgard in 1989 at a show THE OXYMORONS played at Canal Street Tavern. As I remember, he was the most animated person in the place, leaping around in front of the stage with the energy of ten people. Afterwards, he came up, said he loved the show -- raved about us even. OXYMORONS had been together only a few weeks, and it was the first time a stranger had come up to me to tell me he liked the band. I had played a number of shows with OXYMORONS and two other bands (SOCIAL DISEASE, FLESHBATS). But this was the first time I felt like a real musician, whose music was appreciated by people other than family and friends (not that I didn't appreciate the support of family and friends, but they're sort of obligated to appreciate it, as some Joe off the street is not).

Will and I became friends. In those days Will, in fact, became friends with just about everyone he encountered -- but most often musicians. He came to know just about everybody playing in a band in Dayton at that time. He knew every band, went to every show, bought everybody's tapes and records and t-shirts, put their stickers all over his car, his apartment, himself. He became something of a fixture, but one you look forward to seeing. And you could tell that, more than anything else, he wanted to be a real working part of that local musician's world, not just as an observer.

Everybody told him he should just get a guitar and play something. I taught him a few chords, but it was Nick Kizirnis who actually made him do it. I'm pretty sure it was Nick who dubbed him "DOBIE WILLIS," (though maybe it was Ed Lacy), I'm pretty sure it was Nick who convinced him to book his first open stage night, and I know it was Nick who forced Will to sit down with a guitar in front of a microphone and record Stand Your Ground.

What's amazing about most of the tracks on Stand Your Ground is most assuredly NOT the (marginal) talent displayed. Will was not, is not, and never will be a great guitar player (though Nick Kizirnis, who added guitar to some tracks, is). He couldn't carry a tune in an SUV -- or even a Hummer, whether you took the back seats out or not. His lyrics, while attempting to display sharp political acumen, offer a pretty simplistic take on national politics and world affairs: Jello Biafra he is not (though he always wanted to be). His rhyme, symbolism, and diction would seem promising if found in an 8th grade poetry assignment, but that's the best you can say about them.

What IS striking about Stand Your Ground is the complete lack of artifice in what Will was doing here. The anger, the pain, the bitter optimism--all are real. In this respect, Will outclasses even his hero Jello Biafra, who for all his oratory skill and political acumen usually lacks an emotional scope that exceeds the bounds of smirking sarcasm. DOBIE WILLIS also outclasses every other self-styled liberal revolutionary I've ever met, most of whom seem to feel very little except that they are smarter than everybody else while restraining themselves from getting too worked up about anything. And Will certainly outclasses all those flag-waving conservative shreik-bots whose true emotions surface only when someone points out the flaws in their childish, dogmatic ideologies.

In a way that country artists who buy summer homes with royalty checks from cheap patriotic ballads will never understand, Will means it. He means every word. And neither degraded analog tape nor the intervening sixteen years since this was recorded can do anything to change that. In fact, events transpiring in the last six years have conspired to make "Hey George" (which is about Bush 41, but who would know it just by listening to this song?) even more immediate and relevant than it was in 1991. For very good reasons, I can no longer listen to Will's political rants with the same sense of jaded condescension with which I treated them back then. It's too much like scoffing at Cassandra while the Greeks are plundering Troy.

Will and I were in a band together (PLANET ED) for a while and sometimes played open stage night at Canal Street Tavern. When we weren't playing music, we would often get together and watch crappy horror movies, sometimes for hours straight. But bands break up and friendships change--people go their separate ways. I've always been a little ambivalent about my friendship with Will. Though I believe Will is a good soul, he's as human as the rest of us, and he has at times behaved in ways that destroy relationships -- often with other people that I also consider very good friends. Will went through some hard times in the '90s. He and his friends and Dayton itself changed drastically--and nobody, including Will, adapted perfectly to those changes (believe it or not, he joined the navy at one point). Still, as I understand it, he's doing pretty well now. He's living in Portland, playing in a street band, and occasionally writing his own blog. I consider him a good friend.

But coming back to Stand Your Ground, while Will has recorded a fair number of things as a solo and with bands like PLANET ED, HOLDEN #9, and his short-lived back-up band, THE WHITE TRASH ALL-STARS, I dare say that Stand Your Ground remains his masterpiece. Though largely ignored, even in Dayton (especially in Dayton), it represents the kind of raw energy and enthusiasm for the power of music, revolution, and life itself that only a wide-eyed novice with no regard for propriety and convention can pull off--the kind of thing we could use more of today.

There may be some who knew Will when he lived here in Dayton who might laugh (or at least roll their eyes) at what I just wrote. As I mentioned before, Will gave more than one person in Dayton ample reason to hate him -- and I think he would be the first to admit that. To those people, I say: you're right, Will was (maybe still is) a talentless asshole. But as Bob Moore once told me, talent isn't everything, and he was right. I think I've recorded some good music over the years (and a lot of bad music too), but I can't do anything that's good for the same reason Stand Your Ground is good, and I really wish I could.

And as for Will being an asshole, well... I won't dispute it. But Bob Moore also told me that there are plenty of talented assholes in the world, and he was right about that too. A lame response, I know, but it's the best I can muster right now.

Track list:

1. Cheerleader
2. Sweet Al
3. Hey George
4. Neo-Nazi Boot Camps
5. Scat Rap
6. Never Comin' Home
7. Jerry Garcia/Michael Stipe
8. All I believe
9. 21
10. Gloria

Download it! (70 MB) (link re-upped on 2-1-2013)

Recorded by Nick Kizirnis 12/26/1990 - 12/30/1990--except live tracks, recorded by Le Richardson at Canal Street Tavern, Fall 1990. Words and music by Will (except where otherwise noted). Additional guitars by Nick Kizirnis.

take care

---Jones

Prelude: A Message from DOBIE WILLIS

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to post a cassette called Stand Your Ground released by angry folk artist DOBIE WILLIS in 1991. I've got a long write-up on Dobie and his place in Dayton all ready to go with the cassette, but for now I thought I'd let the man speak for himself.

The following is a transcription of a letter that Dobie inserted in each copy of this cassette (some errors in spelling and punctuation have been silently corrected):

This tape is dedicated to:

All of the people who were told they could never do it and should give up. All of the people who were cast out of social functions because they looked or acted different from the "group." All of the people who have ever felt like misfits in their own families or peer groups and in turn have become Anti-social.

This tape is dedicated to all those who still believe in the Power, Freedom and Rebellion of 3 chord Rock'n Roll. To all those who will never accept drum machines and dance mixes of Ramones songs. To those who still believe that Rock music is meant to be played, and listened to as loud, Fast, Angry and Furious as humanly possible. This tape goes out to all those who have the Will to wake up day in and day out and accept life on life's terms, whether that be bad or good. Those who have faith that better things are coming if they have the courage and perseverance to hold on for one more day. This tape goes out to all those who fight the pressure of conformity and will never give in to society's expectations.

If you conform, you have lost it. Be your own person despite what you're told by others speak from your heart. Allow no outside opinions to hinder you. If people laugh at your hopes and dreams, FUCK THEM!

All of the above describes me at one time or another. I've been laughed at, made fun of and severely ridiculed most of my life. I DON'T CARE. I am not a great guitar player or singer, but I went against the advice of others and played music anyway. All I have to offer is my heart and soul and most importantly my sincerity. If people laugh, let them. Do not alter your beliefs for anyone. Do what you feel is right. Follow your heart. Most importantly, Always Stand your ground!

/s/ Will Dalgard/Dobie Willis

A high resolution image of this letter will be included in the download package for the cassette, which I'll be posting tomorrow morning. Until then...

take care

---Jones