'I Have Learned to Respect the Power of Activism'
A Conversation with Alan Adelson & Kate Taverna
PHOTO BY CORY FRYE
A regional chapter of Green Jellÿ Local 69 of Los Angeles, California, coaxes new apostles to perform its unholy bidding in npreparation for its blood harvest Saturday, July 31, at the day-long Fire in the Sky Festival off Highway 226 in Scio.. Reportedly, previously scheduled headliner George Benson canceled at the last minute, thereby relinquishing the opportunity to convert a new generation.. (The previous sentence may be a sick attempt to entice potenrial readership to a seldom-updated website.)
RUSTIC PUNKS,
INFERNAL DOOM
MEMORIES OF THE FIRE IN THE SKY FESTIVAL
DISPATCH // SATURDAY, JULY 31, 2021 // HIGHWAY 226, SOMEWHERE — After tonight, July is dead forever, FUCK.
Dave Wilson and I are barreling toward, of all places, Scio, on an otherwise cloud-cloaked afternoon in the mid-Willamette Valley.
Adrian Smith hammers rhythms to crumbs via Bluetooth as Dave's library tours an array of guitar-rattled soundscapes, running the gamut from Iron Maiden to Rainbow to related side projects. Every new burst comes with a story: seeing Judas Priest on the British Steel tour, encountering the Appice brothers at NARM — Wilson’s an eyewitness to metal histories as they unfolded in the ’80s.
So naturally, guys like us bypass the sign announcing Sweet Home with nary a second thought. It’s Oregon Jamboree weekend, with the town of 10,000 growing to twice its size as country music’s brightest lights entertain the equivalent of two cities on a massive plot of land. Naw, Dave and I have other priorities as twin co-sponsors of a separate, louder event with more compact accommodations. There will be no Dustin Lynch in our immediate futures, no choruses of “Cowboys and Angels.” Around that time instead, my eardrums will explode under the relentlessly thrusting piledrive of Devil Asylum’s “Twatwaffle.” We inhabit a world impervious to Mutt Lange-ification.
We arrive at the Fire in the Sky Festival, planted behind a friendly farmer’s house along a dirt road that seems to wander wherever it wants then belches rather suddenly into a clodded field. Two outhouses flank a balding protrusion too large to see beyond, but too small to be called a hill. Protective trees shroud a languid murky brook. Bands are migrating from their cars, lugging equipment toward the stage: a flatbed with risen platform parked a short distance from the water. Faith No More’s 1990 breakthrough The Real Thing blasts from a nearby truck. Dave and I enter on foot to the Black Sabbath turmoil of “Woodpecker from Mars.”
The festival brain trust is, as far as I was told, Rikki Lawless or, alternately, Rikki Sixx I remember him under a different name from school) and Kelly Auman of Nuclear Nation, who’ll take the stage this evening — the soiree’s scheduled to run from noon to midnight. Rikki’s charged with charging the operation, i.e., positioning amplifiers and running their massive volume through a soundboard while Auman and one of his daughters helm a merch tent, grilling burgers, serving liquids and moving band/festival T-shirts and stickers. (Although Willamette Valley Presents LLC and Mid Valley Noise were listed as festival sponsors, we were not involved in its curation.)
It’s quite a slate, this lineup — among ’em, Erik Anarchy, Sado Freako, Stepper, Cunt Crusher (don't Google that), Nuclear Nation, The Free Stooges, Vicious Cycle, No More Control, Skulburger, Devil Asylum and the marquee headliner, Green Jellÿ, whose frontman Bill Manspeaker, apparently, damaged his foot and couldn’t make the trip. Which kinda suxxd, as I was looking forward to commiserating with him again after our initial 2016 meeting, when I interviewed him for the Albany Democrat-Herald and watched the master showman decimate a local rattrap with a show for the ages. However, the regional chapter of his band came, anyway, their strangely silent leader represented in effigy by a wheelchair-bound skeleton. The shebang was billed as a metal, punk, and doom-aganza and should have been covered by health insurance.
The action inevitably went down shortly before 1 p.m., opening with Beaverton two-piece Erik Anarchy, a palate-teaser for the day in full.
They were chased by a rapaciously tight, raucous duo called Shone/Shown/Shoan/Showan/I don’t remember; they said it, they didn't spell it, and they weren’t listed in the promotional material, and they've eluded my crack (-fueled) research squad, so they exist for now as eternal mystery. For 15 minutes they calmly drove shivers up collective medullas in a blessed union of man on loud guitar, thundering riffs so thick they devoured him in sonic walls, woman on equally devastating drums. Had they peddled merchandise and were I smart enough to carry cash, I’d be dirt-napped under their noise in remembrance right meow.
Other highlights, as I recall: Sado Freako, a five-piece collection of semi-costumed lovable reprobates that seemed to invent jams from freakish impulse and drove one of its members through suggestive narration to wallow in the swampy brine before rushing into the audience for hugs, then execute an impromptu dance that involved diving up his own cavities. (Representative lyric: “One nut sac / one nut sac / one nut in my sack,” whose fetching musicality stays with you nevertheless.)
Members of The Free Stooges improvised while awaiting their drummer, who motored to the stage itself in his hatchback to unload and stack his kit — that's how true men apologize for being late. (Ain’t gonna see Lonestar do that at the Jamboree.) There were a few jam sessions like that, with Rikki substituting on guitar, drums, or vocals for absent members.
Revelations came with the sinking sun. The phenomenal Vicious Cycle blasted shards of mind-dissolving snot-punk, and I’ve gotta riddle this passage with adjectives 'cause I can’t find much info by way of bio. Nevwertheless, they’re a diverse multigenerational quartet with a mother and son on bass and rhythm guitar, respectively, plus an absolute beast on drums and an accomplished guitarist soloing subversively beneath power chords.
The members of Skulburger were old enough to remember punk’s dawn in the ’70s — maybe even the rise of Nuggets-fueled garage-rock in the late ’60s — and revealed their brash mastery of all forms. Nuclear Nation moved from positions of backstage prominence to entertain with thunder as night cast its pall, Rikki back on drums and Kelly buzz-sawing knife riffs like butter.
Enclosed below, please find a few moments of Devil Asylum’s penultimate masterpiece theater. On loan from Vancouver, the four-piece (usually a trio, according to their Facebook page; yeah, I CHEATED) flattened eardrums as far away as the Portland suburbs with bellicose-throated Viking majesty. As you can assumefrom this footage, I stood mere feet from the volley and as of Sunday, I still can’t hear small dogs.
Even sans a Manspeaker, Green Jellÿ still worked marvelously. As always, it’s the audience’s willing participation in semi-goofy antics (with the added lift of cathartic cartoon violence) that makes the presentation work. And their presence, weirdly, matches what Manspeaker ultimately envisioned when I spoke with him five years ago: that the band could go on forever, long after its architect skanked to the Cowgod afterlife.
They opened, of course, with Green Jellÿ’s only real radio hit, 1993’s “Three Little Pigs,” an anarchically sloppy sing-along shouted in basement beer bashes for years (I know; I’m old enough to have attended them.) I’ve seen these guys twice over the last half-decade and it’s still a blast to hear bulked-up slamdancers of all stripes trill, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!” while knocking each other to the ground. I always forget how great Cereal Killers Soundtrack was until I hear much of its twisted oeuvre brayed by a loud band: “Anarchy in the U.K.,” set in Stone Age Bedrock with its Upside-Down Flint-Rubble Bubble Cake; “Electric Harley House (of Love)”; “Green Jellÿ Theme Song” (inviting an audience to chant “Green Jellö [their pre-gelatin empire lawsuit moniker] suxx!” from beneath sweltering costume heads, empowering the powerless); and “Obey the Cowgod,” featuring crowds as willing disciples tithing before an oversized bovine noggin.
Everyone buys into the show and becomes part of it, whether they desire to or not. We left just as the band launched into “Rock-N-Roll Pumpkihn,” and I couldn’t help muttering, “Say it again!” under my breath like the 20-year-old delinquent I used to be before I surrendered to the pleasures of middle age.
Not ba for my first real concert since February 2020, before madness puked us into the void. See you next summer, my COVID cupcakes.