Friday, August 2nd, 2013
Thursday, October 10th, 2013: Places, Special Places.
Fourth in a series about places that have become special to my friends and me, as we’ve ventured there together year after year to share good fellowship, and sometimes to witness the mysteries of creation.
Close friends have heard me talk about Mel Gray, my art teacher from the seventh to the twelfth grades, who became a mentor for much of my life, the first among a small group of elders I’ve cultivated, people who’ve accumulated priceless knowledge and wisdom and who teach by example. In our rural farming community, school functioned as a repressive form of social control, bullying us into narrow conformity; some of our teachers rebelled against that system, befriending me and my fellow struggling outsiders and welcoming us into their homes and lives, but among them, Mel was special. He lived and breathed art, but in addition, he shared the love of nature, the love of crafting and building and self-reliance, that I had inherited from my father and grandfather. His curiosity was limitless, and he was that rarest of persons in our narcissistic times, a good listener. He took us, his proteges, seriously, cared about our lives and became a true friend as we grew up and went out into the world. In school, after class, and at home with his large, friendly and talented family, he challenged us and expanded our horizons. Forever after, throughout our far-flung lives, we would return on pilgrimages to honor that.
Mel had a large property with a stone cabin in virgin hardwood forest in the hills south of our county, where hillside springs feed creeks that drain into small rivers that in turn become tributaries to the big Ohio. During and after my senior year of high school, I met and fell in love with Mel’s niece, and as I recall, it was she who first took me to what we all came to call “Mel’s Farm,” although Mel himself called it “Gray’s Wilderness.”
We were both in college in Chicago and had been secretly living together in violation of her father’s decree. Her father, Mel’s cousin, despised me, and our relationship was always tinged with danger and rebellion as we conspired to avoid his wrath. Back in the countryside for summer vacation, we arranged to borrow a car and head south into the woods.
It really was just about the closest to wilderness you could find in the Midwest. Heading south from the glacially leveled fields of our county, the two-lane blacktop begins winding along forested ridges and dipping into hollows where sycamores line the courses of the little rivers. An even smaller and more tortuous country road takes you farther back to a tiny crossroads settlement, from which you head south into the deep forest. Eventually the pavement ends and you’re faced with a rough dirt track up a long hill, impassable during and after storms.
At the top of the hill there’s a deeply rutted trail through a small farm, past a decrepit tobacco barn, through a small ridgetop cornfield, and into a dark wood. A few more gentle turns along the ridgetop, then you reach the cabin in its clearing.
At that time, the two-foot-thick stone walls enclosed one big room. With small windows, it was dark and musty inside, and sparsely furnished, not much used by the family. The only piece of furniture I really remember was an old church pew. Outside the forest pressed in from all sides and the small clearing was drenched with sun and the singing of birds and insects. We were far from people and towns, living a magical dream of young romance, and it was the first time I’d ever made love outdoors.
Another summer, we returned with Mark and John, my best high school friends, to spend a night. The friends camped outside in the clearing while Kathryn and I slept in the cabin. In high school, we had formed a band which was really a precocious performance art ensemble, bursting with creativity, inventing new art forms. Now, we mostly jammed on traditional tunes that my friends picked up from retro recording artists like Ry Cooder and Leon Redbone. Being able to share that wilderness was priceless for us: a timeless space where we were freed from the painful emotional baggage of growing up as outsiders in a traditional rural community, and insulated by the dense forest from the prying, judgmental eyes of families and authorities.
When we got ready to leave, Kathryn marshaled us into a whirlwind of activity to sweep out the cabin. I remember young bodies swinging through a cloud of dust, all sparkling in sunbeams from the windows and doors.
A year later, Kathryn had left me, and I returned during the winter holidays with Mark and his girlfriend, Linda, and my grad school friend, Tom. I rode in Tom’s sports car; the dirt road was frozen hard, and the high ruts dislodged his exhaust pipe on the way in. The air was crisp and silent, the hardwood forest was bare, and the first thing we did was hike down through the bare woods to the creek on the north side. These small creeks flowed over shelves of limestone that were full of fossils; now they were mostly frozen over.
Other local friends joined us. At night we got a fire going in the cabin and started jamming.
Eventually, Mel retired from teaching and moved the family to a little rustic “art colony” a few miles downstream from the farm. That’s where I made my pilgrimages during my years as a bohemian in San Francisco. Then, after all the kids had moved out on their own, he and wife Pinkie, a prodigious and beloved painter and mistress of traditional crafts, moved out to the wilderness. They turned the cabin’s attic into a spacious loft with rollaway beds and a wall of windows facing south over the forest, and they added a big kitchen and bath. Mel had been collecting architectural salvage at farm sales all over the area and storing it in sheds on the farm; the rebuilt cabin had bits and pieces of this, including a stairway bannister made of wooden forms for the giant gears of historic grist mills, and they built a beautiful detached studio incorporating more of their architectural treasure trove. The farm had become a family work of art, with numerous outbuildings sprawled along the ridge: a trove of craft materials, books, records and memorabilia, the museum of their lifetime, so that visits became revelatory as Mel and Pinkie took us on tours and showed off their endless curiosities, including occasionally ambitious gardens and orchards and projects in alternative, self-sufficient technology.
At the same time, I was falling in love with the desert mountains and canyons of the West, growing more and more uncomfortable in the city, and fantasizing about living off the land in the ways of the desert Indians. During one winter visit, Mel unearthed a recent magazine article about a primitive survival school in Utah that claimed to teach those ancient ways, and the following summer I headed off for a field course at Boulder Outdoor Survival School that changed my life and showed me how people really lived in the lands that I loved. Mel was still showing me the way, and his place in the wilderness was still the source.
But knowing what I wanted didn’t make it happen. I was alone in my dream. I moved to my own wilderness for a year, leaving a girlfriend back in the city. Friends sympathized but none could join me. Hard years followed, more years in the city and the urban economy that took me farther from my dreams. Mel’s health was deteriorating, and visits often consisted of watching cable TV with him in the cabin. Aging changed his world and his focus and made him into a different person, less the mentor, less the role model. But occasionally we connected just as strongly as ever. I was able to show him my latest artwork on a laptop screen, and his home in the forest retained its magic and mystery.
One winter, I walked alone through the bare trees down the south slope to the creek on that side, and followed it toward the river. Nearing the river valley where a floodplain opened out, I was surprised by a shout from above. A young deer hunter had been hiding in brush up the slope from me. I told him I was a friend of the family, and he said Mel had given him permission to hunt in return for a share of the kill.
Another time, when Mel was in his mid-80s, he needed to grade the ridgetop trail, and he let me drive his ancient John Deere tractor while he rode on the side.
Sometimes I spent the night with Mel and Pinkie in the cabin, and other times I left late, driving those back roads alone, awash with precious memories and the chill of mortality. Once I had to pee and pulled off beside the river on a dirt trail through the trees. Standing in the darkness I noticed a small green light moving slowly through the grass, some unknown luminous being. Ah, the mysteries still hidden in that tired land of childhood.
As I write this, Mel is in a nursing home and his family is struggling to dispose of the place in the woods, the family work of art, the “museum of a lifetime” and the place that stood for me and my friends as an example of freedom and hope, of a more creative way of life in the midst of the society that seemed to trap us as adolescents.
As I re-evaluated my life experience, I came to see that isolation was not the answer, that even a big family was not enough; you needed an entire, robust community. It was not for me to retreat to a cabin in the woods. But Mel had never been truly isolated; the lesson I needed to emulate was his lifelong example of listening, caring, and encouraging young people to expand their curiosity, liberate their creativity, and pursue their dreams.
Thursday, November 21st, 2013: 2013 Trips, Mojave Desert, Regions, Road Trips.
18 months had passed since my last visit to my wilderness home in the central canyon complex of this remote, little-known mountain range in North America’s harshest desert. Since then, I’d learned more about how to manage my ruptured disc and bad hip, and I’d intensified my workouts, increasing my strength by 20% in the past year and building up my cardiopulmonary capacity by doing 8-12 miles of peak hikes per week at 7,000-9,000′ elevation. I had felt strong and confident. But during the past month, I’d suffered the worst flareup of back pain in years, followed by a week of searing pain in my thigh as a result of compensating for the back pain. The pain had finally subsided just before the trip, but I wasn’t sure how much hiking I’d be able to do. In any event, I was really looking forward to spending time with friends who love this place as much as I do.
Thursday 11/14
I turned off the old highway and took the gravel road down through the ghost town early in the afternoon. Two men were walking around the abandoned tungsten millsite, with a backhoe parked nearby. I wondered what they were up to, but I was anxious to reach the mountains, so I drove on up the pipeline road to the entrance to the Pass, where I stopped to deflate my tires to 16 psi for better traction in the sandy road. This was the first time I’d tried to make it in my little 2WD pickup, which was light on the driving wheels and often got stuck or lost traction in sand, mud, snow or ice. But renting a 4WD vehicle to get out here was no longer in my budget.
The little truck had no problem on the Pass road or the Gulch road up the almost imperceptible slope of the vast alluvial fan, lined with “desert pavement,” surrounding the west side of the mountains, with its wide vista from the distant white mountains in the north to the low-lying dunes in the south. There was only one old eroded set of tire tracks up the Gulch, clearly preceding the late monsoon rains, indicating much less traffic than in the past. Finally I reached the high point of the road before it enters the mountains, where you can look up the gulch and see the Statue rising on the central ridge of the range, framed by our north and south ridges, with the big dry wash flowing toward and below you on your right.
From here, the road dips onto the Pleistocene bench and then into the big sandy wash, which the little truck negotiated with no problems, all the way to where the interior basin opens out and the road turns left toward our gate across the bend of the upper Gulch, where the dramatic, incredibly rugged Mine Peak rises directly ahead like something out of heroic myth or legend. There were no tracks past the gate. I arrived at Cowboy Camp, our historic main camp site above the gate, at about 3pm and began assembling the shade structure for our ice chests from salvage materials stashed around the camp. The sun was rapidly setting behind the west ridge, and camp was in full shade by 3:30; what had been a mild day turned cool in the shade.
Based on a cell phone conversation in the morning, I’d expected Dave and David to arrive soon after me, but the west-facing slopes turned bright orange, the sun set, and I started a fire, set up my stove, and began cooking ground venison and rice. Finally around 6pm, a caravan of 3 trucks rolled up the wash under the nearly full moon: David, Dave, and their friend John, a biochemist from Ventura.
The night was totally still, not even a breeze. After dinner the four of us walked up the Gulch about a mile and a half in the moonlight. Shortly after we turned back toward camp, I felt myself racing to keep up with the three long-legged, fast-walking guys who were at least a head taller than me, but when I slowed down, my bad hip started hurting. The others disappeared up ahead without stopping or looking back. I was limping at first, but it became so bad I had to take half-steps, alone, stopping every hundred yards, all the way back to camp.
Mosquitos drove the others inside their camper shells, while I struggled to set up a net over my sleeping bag. The refueling flights (for decades, the military has used this mountain range to train pilots for mid-air refueling) came over, then clouds began to drift across from the west, becoming a continuous white quilted ceiling backlit by the moon, which lasted most of the night, incredibly beautiful.
Friday 11/15
In the morning, the others, compulsive distance hikers, were anxious to get started on their first serious hike, up to the Mine then along the ridge to Carbonate and across the head of the Gulch to the head of Bert. My hip was still sore, and I decided to head for the shade house and spend a day relaxing and absorbing the spirit of the place. There, I added another weighted piece of sheet metal to cover gaps in the dilapidated roof, lay in my Yucatan hammock reading, made a short hike to our seep, and had lunch. In the morning, I sporadically heard the voices of the others as if they were nearby, and saw a hawk wheeling above the ridge. The seep turned out to be dry, but bees were active in the cracks and there was a little green moss indicating water within the rock. The day was warm but breezy and chilly in the shade. A roadrunner explored outside the shade house, and curious phainopeplas were everywhere all the time.
Back at camp in the late afternoon, the others had cut their trip short by skipping Bert and coming down the Gulch, after climbing Carbonate. David cut up a big piece of recently-caught tuna for delicious sashimi. We all waited in vain for Friend and Jef to arrive, under a clear sky and a bright moon waxing toward full.
Saturday 11/16
Getting up in the morning, I saw a hummingbird on bladderpod flowers near my sleeping bag. Dave and David were ready to take John on a longer hike to Blockhead and the “Indian trail” to the south of our camp. After being left alone again, I explored the ridge above camp, still hoping for Friend and Jef to show up. My hip was feeling better, and shortly after 11am I started up toward the Mine, taking a pain pill and figuring that if I had to turn back I would have gravity on my side. The upper part of the hike is like something out of Lord of the Rings, involving risky traverses across steep, loose rock, precarious ascents of loose rock and boulders, and lots of tight squeezes between cliffs and deadly sharp yucca blades, all at dizzying heights with a glorious panorama of a hundred miles of desert spreading out thousands of feet below.
It was very dicy, but the pain pill kept me calm and optimistic, and I made it to the top in 2-1/2 hours, going slowly and carefully with lots of rest stops. I felt it was right at the limit of difficulty and danger that I can now risk, even with medication, and I vowed never to try it again alone. How ironic that I’d worked so hard during the past year, only to find that these “Achilles heel” type weaknesses, and the fear of triggering them by slipping or falling, can undermine all my conditioning! It was a sobering experience that a hike I used to find easy was now so daunting.
I’ve climbed many peaks, from legendary Mt. Shasta, at 14,200′, to Guatemala’s Volcan Atitlan at 11,600′, but something about the Mine peak, just shy of 5,000′, makes it feel taller, the air thinner and the view grander, than any other peak. On top of the world, on the ledge outside the improbable mine, with a sheer drop-off to a desert panorama reaching more than a hundred miles away without a paved road or human dwelling in any part of it, I ate my lunch among exotic rocks, pink barrel cactus, rusty metal, dry-rot timbers and the massive old Sullivan diesel engine that prospectors had winched up over 2,000 vertical feet of random boulders a century ago, an almost unimaginable effort driven by single-minded greed. The winter days were short and it was already time to head back; I started down the treacherous, super-steep east slope toward the seep, slipping again and again on loose rock, feeling old and feeble, and it really seemed to take forever. I remembered the first time I’d come down that way more than 20 years earlier. The loose rock had freaked me out, but I found that by imagining I was a bighorn sheep with opposable hooves, focusing on gripping the rock with my toes, it became doable. Didn’t seem to help much now.
Back at camp I met Friend and Everett, and the other hikers had returned as well. Friend and Everett had arrived just after I had headed up to the Mine, and had spent the day hiking near camp. David had found an amazing quartz crystal below Blockhead, and they had come upon a recent campsite with two cleared footprints for tarps at the top of the Indian trail. I couldn’t believe David’s luck in finding the crystal – after Dave’s earlier discovery of a beautiful museum-quality stone tool – objects the like of which I’d never found here myself. But David said, “Max, as an artist you get to create beautiful things, but I can only look for them!” Dinner that night was surf and turf: lobster, steak and sausage. Jef drove up as dinner was being cooked, completing our group.
Sunday 11/17
Friend planned to leave in late morning; John planned to leave in early afternoon and Jef planned to leave after dinner. The four biologists first walked up to the seep to check and service the motion sensor camera David had placed there 18 months ago. Max and Everett hiked up the ridge opposite camp looking for the “throne” Everett and Friend had created the previous day.
After the biologists returned, John left, and the remaining three headed over to Bert to check the camera Dave had placed there last March. It turned out that the camera had malfunctioned – or had been triggered by blowing grass, shooting thousands of identical images, but amazingly, in the middle of the series, it had captured a hungry-looking mountain lion, perfectly framed in the center of the image.
The photos from the seep included almost every other major animal and bird of the area, from ground squirrel to bighorn sheep, quail to hawk, and showing that our Gulch bobcat swings by almost every day, including within an hour of our visit, probably spying us and motivated by feline curiosity.
That night the reduced group feasted on grilled tuna belly and lamb steak, and Jef drove off under the full moon.
Monday 11/18
After a second day of relative leisure, I was ready for my special hike to my holy place, the sacred heart of the mountain range, the Plateau. I really wanted David and Dave to join me, but they said they were finally ready to relax after their three days straight of hiking at their own fast pace.
While finishing our breakfast we all suddenly noticed that the sky was filled with dozens of jet contrails going every which way. During the past days of our visit, we could only remember seeing an isolated contrail once or twice. It was spooky; we speculated an apocalypse in the outside world and discussed what we would do if we found civilization in collapse on our departure from paradise.
The Plateau hike involves two miles across the rolling bajada from Cowboy Camp, up a meandering sandy wash which is alternately narrow and broad to the base of the dry Waterfall, where you’re faced with a challenging climb, 500 feet up a very steep slope of loose rock and crumbling granite ledges protected by thorny cat claw and deadly yucca. Again, a pain pill placated my pesky hip and back.
At the top you drop into the Waterfall itself, which is a series of white granite ledges sculpted by water into sweeping curves and pools which you can walk up to the lip of the Plateau itself and the meandering streambed which is dry in most seasons. The Plateau is a rolling area with little level ground, mostly consisting of steep ridges and cliffs dissected by the stream drainage, with the central ridge of the mountain range towering above, punctuated by the Statue, who is now close. The stream itself is choked in many places with brush or boulders that require climbing around, but there are many rewards for effort; the Plateau hides the densest trove of riches in the entire range.
Like the Gulch Seep, the Plateau streambed was bone dry. At the foot of a small pour-off I encountered my first prize: the partial skeleton of a mature bighorn ram, from pelvis to skull, with one horn detached like the skull I had found at the top of the Plateau Waterfall on my very first visit more than 20 years ago.
Next I came to the first group of pinyon pines on the south bank above the streambed, and checked this year’s crop of cones for nuts, but all the intact nutshells I cracked contained only a paper-thin “ghost” of a nut. However, I began finding healthy pinyon seedlings, so some nuts must have matured in recent years.
The plateau is an island paradise of relict vegetation found nowhere else in these or the neighboring mountains: willows, scrub oak, silver leaf manzanita. I began encountering isolated, man-sized, perniciously invasive tamarisk plants in the lower drainage, and plants twice as tall farther up, recovering after the official eradication project back in the 90s. Masses of dead tamarisk still choked parts of the drainage from that old project.
I love coming upon the stands of coyote willow at places where water remains near the surface of the ground. The first stand grows around the “window” of a small rock shelter with convex ceiling; the next two include unusual tall trees, up to 40′ in height, which appear to be a distinct species but have the same leaves as the small coyote willows. The tall willow trees had died back significantly from drought, but in general the stands of coyote willow were looking good, maybe even expanding. I also love the small “meadows” of native bunch grass which cover shallow slopes next to the willow groves.
My destination was the Indian puberty site and campsite, which is hidden above the stream on a high ledge. I had discovered it 20 years ago when looking for a natural campsite; above a wet place in the streambed, surrounded by pinyon and juniper trees, there was a large, perfectly level space directly below the Statue with a sunset view and a collection of rocks at hand for a fire ring. On that first visit, I was fresh from my primitive survival course, and had initially tried to build a shelter of pinyon boughs and brush, but it got dark too quickly and I ended up trying to sleep in a cave which got so cold I had to keep a fire going all night next to my thin bedroll.
The morning after that long-ago cold night, I had breakfasted in a boulder nook soaking up the morning sunlight, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed a pottery shard lying in a crack between boulders, of the simple style the desert Indians made quickly and disposed of easily as they traveled lightly on foot across vast distances. I followed the crack uphill, finding more shards, to areas of soil darkened by generations of campfire ash, which were impregnated with more shards and colorful flakes of tool-making stone carried or traded from far away. Around the corner of a towering boulder was an alcove containing a flat-topped granite rock like a table, with shallow cuplike cavities carved laboriously into its hard surface. Years later, I met and worked with the newly hired archaeologist for the Mojave Natural Preserve, and he told me that these “cupules” were probably made and used as part of a girls’ puberty ceremony. Groups of girls who were coming of age would run together to this site from their home village – maybe on the Colorado River, far to the east, or Twentynine Palms, even farther to the west – to hold a mysterious rite somehow involving these carvings.
Here, far from civilization, in the ancient campsite of a people whose way of life we destroyed, on a high plateau surrounded by white granite cliffs, below an iconic anthropomorphic monolith revered by prehistoric Indians and Anglo prospectors alike, I always feel like I’m in the center of the world. But I never found a way to live here, and it’s clear that the Indians didn’t either. It’s hard even for wildlife; the resources are just too sparse on the ground. Bighorn sheep pass through here on their treks between major water sources. The Indians used this remote but sacred mountain range ceremonially and for opportunistic hunting, not for village sites or subsistence foraging.
Around the puberty site, I found some exposed pottery shards and stone tool flakes, but not as many as in the past. Again, these days were short; I didn’t want to have to shower in the shade back at camp, so I started back down right after lunch.
Dave and David had done an easy walk across the bajada to the boulder pile just south of the Waterfall; they showed up in camp after my return. Dinner was grilled lamb racks and sausages; we all agreed the weather had been perfect during the entire trip. Dave gazed silently at the roaring campfire while David talked excitedly about how relaxed he felt.
Tuesday 11/19
Not having a job to get back to, I was the last to leave in the morning, getting started shortly after 10am as the refueling flight was making a morning pass. After the others left, I dismantled and stored the pieces of the ice chest shade structure and set up the cable gate across the wash. Feeling wistful, I drove slowly down the lower Gulch, out of the mountains and across the alluvial fan with its forever views. Below the Pass, I stopped to re-inflate my tires, a 25 minute job with a cheap 12 volt compressor. The day had started with a promise of warmth, but clouds had come over and even before noon it was getting cooler.
Despite the pain and frustration, I felt this was my most enjoyable Gulch visit in years. I regretted the shortness of time with Friend and Everett, and I wished that others had been able to join me on my hikes, but I felt that my mix of relaxation and hiking had been perfect. My lumbar condition resulted in frequent pain throughout each day when doing routine chores; camping is becoming more of a challenge with the requisite awkward heavy lifting, leaning, bending, crouching and kneeling, and I was looking forward to a bed and other conveniences, but I began thinking of ways to adapt my camping routine in the future, until the inevitable day when I would no longer be able to visit my wilderness home. We all reach a point in life at which bittersweet pleasures are the only pleasures we can expect.
Thursday, December 5th, 2013: Animals, Nature.
I have to preface these galleries with my own ambivalence. I’m not crazy about adding technology to this wild place; I’m not crazy about remote sensing in general. I think the photos are cool, and I respect my biologist friends who maintain the cameras, but I treasure my own direct observations and the stories of friends who’ve seen these animals personally, far more than these robotic photos. Increasingly, science is technology-happy, prizing instrumental data over personal observation. Gone are the days of natural history, when people who loved nature patiently immersed themselves in habitats long enough to observe the life cycles of animals and plants, recording their observations with universal, primitive, and sustainable technologies: drawing and writing.
These galleries represent my own selection of “greatest hits” from each cam, and I expect to update them. The complete chronological sets of cam photos contain a lot of useful data and will presumably be available to legitimate researchers upon request.
The Seep
Weather
Insects
Birds
Rodents
Canines
Felines
Ringtail Cat
Sheep
The Spring
Birds
Felines
Musical Inspirations: Punk & Post-Punk
Friday, December 13th, 2013: Arts, Music & Dance.
Calendar collage by Max and Mark, 1980
A Golden Age
My generation was too young to play an active role in the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, but we had our own moment of glory in the aftermath of punk music, as part of an urban youth culture more creative and energetic than anything I’ve seen since.
Punk embodied a cultural, political, and economic rebellion: against mainstream commercialized music and lifestyles, against government and authority figures, and in protest of working-class poverty and hopelessness. Post-punk took its rebellious, do-it-yourself ethic from punk, but post-punk music was less a genre than the musical component of a continuous, open-ended underground arts scene committed to exploration and experimentation.
It was a time of economic hopelessness in the cities and disillusionment in society, a few years before personal computers and the digital revolution, bookended between the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster and the regressive Reagan presidency, when young people felt betrayed rather than empowered by technology, and the media were relentlessly promoting a shallow, meaningless consumer lifestyle. So urban young people, instead of focusing on their careers, focused on their “free time” when they could collectively create or participate in their own alternative culture.
It was a unique, magical time resulting from a rare combination of factors: disaffected youth, cheap urban rents, and the late-70s vanguard of punk music as a unifying inspiration. It may seem paradoxical to some, but poverty and mind-numbing jobs, rather than affluence and economic opportunity, inspired creativity, because we were forced to create our own culture with much more limited resources than the youth of today, and without access to the infinite interwebs, we had to work hard to discover and share new ideas.
My experience was limited to San Francisco and Los Angeles, but our local scenes were connected to the distant cities like New York, London and Berlin via friendships, record shops (like our SF outpost of London’s Rough Trade), zines, artist tours and festivals. All of this occurred “under the radar” of mainstream media, so that it was a true underground phenomenon, and unlike today’s urban art scene, it was the only game in town for young people, the only challenging and meaningful way to spend your time, and unlike the rave scene of the late 90s it was participatory, with more creators and fewer spectators.
For a few short years in San Francisco, my fellow artists and I opened and maintained dozens of underground venues which hosted a continuous lineup of shows, salons, parties and large-scale events eagerly supported and attended by our crowd of thousands of roving cultural explorers, so that any night of the week it was hard to choose, and groups of us ranged deliriously back and forth from the Mission to scary South of Market tenements, finally stumbling home in the wee hours of the morning.
Our culture, documented in forgotten zines like San Francisco’s Search & Destroy, Damage and Re/Search, was open-endedly eclectic, embracing minimal rock, African music, industrial noise, electronic experimentation and sampling, video and performance art, free jazz and chamber folk. We were passionate about anything that wasn’t mainstream.
Cover of Damage, December 1980
Cover of Re/Search, first issue, featuring The Slits, Throbbing Gristle, and Sun Ra
Rotten to the Core
My own coming-of-age began in 1978. I was living in a group house south of the city, where I had been playing and listening to nothing but bluegrass, convinced that popular music was a wasteland. But my roommate James, an older anti-war rebel and environmental activist from the hippie generation, suddenly started playing the records of the Modern Lovers, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols nonstop, all day long, and my mind was blown.
The following year, I moved to CalArts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles, where I squatted in an art studio, living on welfare and food stamps, wrote punk songs, played in my friend Mark’s punk-inspired new wave group, and saw the LA band X performing in a small classroom. Newscasts were bludgeoning us with the Three Mile Island apocalypse, the Iranian revolution, the mass suicide of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple cult, the assassination of gay activist Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, and the unfolding, gruesome stories of serial killers in the U.S., when the first recordings of the definitive British post-punk bands, Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, appeared and became the soundtracks of our nihilistic parties and road trips and the main inspirations for our own music.
Max’s drawing of Los Angeles band X performing in a CalArts classroom, 1979
One of Max’s early punk lyrics, set to music in 2010:
Tracks like PIL’s Swan Lake and Poptones, and Joy Division’s Transmission and Love Will Tear Us Apart, were our anthems, simultaneously angry, cynical, and energizing. Our society was rotten to the core, and as PIL’s John Lydon sang, “anger is an energy.”
Burning Brightly
The following year, I got a boring day job in the tech industry that took me to San Francisco, where I immediately found myself in the midst of a cultural explosion. I was going to shows several nights a week at venues like Jetwave and Target Video that hadn’t existed the year before, and writing songs and putting together a band on the other nights, making new art and meeting dozens of kindred spirits and bursting with new ideas.
Ad in Damage for Max’s first group art show, at Target Video in San Francisco, October 1980
New York experimental dance band Liquid Idiot playing an after-hours set in the basement of Valencia Tool & Die, August 1980
The tracks Nightcrawling and Too Close, sharing the dark visions of post-punk bands like Joy Division and PIL, were composed in 1980 by overdubbing repeatedly between stereo cassette decks, using primitive sound makers and ambient audio samples.
Our local scene peaked in October 1980 with the Western Front festival, which demonstrated the unity of punk, post-punk, street art, performance art, film and video art, supporting local artists and introducing us to exciting touring acts like New York’s DNA and England’s Delta 5. My new roommate and future bandmate Gary introduced me to the brilliant, totally unique Welsh chamber group Young Marble Giants, who became one of my biggest inspirations.
18″ x 24″ poster for the Western Front festival, San Francisco, October 1980
Max’s drawing of the New York no-wave band DNA, 1980
Max’s drawing of the Welsh band Young Marble Giants, 1980
The Terra Incognita tracks Love Chant and Wireless took the minimalist aesthetic of Young Marble Giants in a more experimental direction.
Our local luminaries included electronic pioneers Rhythm & Noise, the chamber trio Minimal Man, the atmospheric trio Tuxedomoon, the politically offensive Dead Kennedys, and the perpetually fucked up Flipper. They were all inspiring in different ways, and we all hung out together at after-hours parties and neighborhood clubs like the Mission’s Valencia Tool & Die and South of Market’s notorious A-Hole Gallery, where you often stumbled over underage junkies nodding out as you climbed the four flights of dingy stairs to the illegal speakeasy.
Max’s drawing of the San Francisco post-punk band Tuxedomoon, 1980
Within the next year, I got to see both New Order (the successor of Joy Division) and Public Image Ltd, but I had already organized my own band and performance art group, Terra Incognita, which was to last the rest of the decade, repeatedly morphing into completely different styles and lineups, all inspired in some way by that short-lived cultural revolution, which had all but faded away by 1983.
Max’s poster for Terra Incognita’s first show, 1981
Max onstage with his gear at a Terra Incognita show, 1981
Jon and Max performing in the Terra Incognita loft, 1982
It simply burned too brightly while it lasted, and it couldn’t be sustained. But from 1979 to 1982, it produced a major segment of my mature repertoire, from early songs like Nightcrawling and Hand Over Hand to the later Terra Incognita instrumentals Black Water and Plains of Abraham. And it continued to have repercussions in my creative work, as in 1985 I met Katie, a Los Angeles artist who introduced me to the music of the Arizona cowpunk band Meat Puppets, and 1986 we met Sebastian, a Portuguese artist who introduced us to the music of England’s Penguin Cafe Orchestra, which had started at the same time as the Sex Pistols, because he thought we sounded like them. Who would have thought that something as brutal as punk music could open the way to a genre as delicate as chamber folk?
Our friend Sebastian brought us a cassette of Penguin Cafe Orchestra after hearing us perform songs like The Sheep.
Lasting Legacy
The post-punk scene introduced African music to Western audiences. In early 1981, my new bandmate Jon gave me a cassette of West African highlife music, so that when a few months later Talking Heads came out with their African-inspired Remain in Light album, I was already on the path to learning and absorbing African styles, which I learned directly from West African luminaries OJ Ekemode, Joni Haastrup and Malonga Casquelourd in jams and performances at my loft in early 1982.
Some post-punk bands, like New Order and Gang of Four, joined mainstream artists like Michael Jackson and new wave acts like Eurythmics in the club scene, which for us survivors of the dying cultural revolution was one way to keep some of that energy going – we still loved to dance!
Punk and post-punk music established the DIY paradigm for all the “alternative” and “indie” artists to follow, from the 80s until now. The early electronic experimentation of artists like Rhythm & Noise and Cabaret Voltaire, nurtured by the post-punk scene, evolved into the vast, diverse electronic music and dance culture of today.
Although the tight-knit post-punk youth culture collapsed in the early 80s, its ripples continued to inspire new music throughout the decade, so that in Terra Incognita’s most visible phase, from 1986-1990, we always had plenty of good company in a vibrant local music scene, from hard-core experimentalists like Bardo and the Invertebrates, to our friends American Music Club, who gained a worldwide audience.
The Meat Puppets are still around, after polishing their sound and surviving various traumas, and in the 90s they became my favorite rock band, inspiring my songs Yellow Mud and Drivin’ Round Loaded. And New Order evolved into pillars of the urban club scene during the late 80s and early 90s, releasing classic-sounding tracks like Waiting for the Siren’s Call and Krafty well into the aughts.
Although Yellow Mud may not sound anything like the Meat Puppets, the lyrics were inspired by Curt Kirkwood’s mystical, childlike style of writing.
The main riff in Go to Them was inspired by the simple, catchy rhythmic phrases in New Order’s classic songs.
Three decades after the post-punk era, we live in an era of widespread complacency. Unlike my generation, young people in the affluent cities of the First World seem happy to immerse themselves in their careers, media, and technology, trusting that they can solve the world’s problems just by making those wonderful, “democratic” gadgets and apps available to everyone, with Google wifi balloons hanging over every African village. Gone are the hopelessness, anger and cynicism that drove the creativity of the early 80s, to be replaced by the boundless optimism of the tech industry and the thrill of making lots of money. Those of us who still perceive cycles in nature and society, including my ecologist friends, wonder when it will all come full circle, with technology again exposing its dark side, and the easy money fading away. I see a society that’s still rotten to the core, and more destructive than ever. Anger is an energy.
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