WNOC

Lee reminded me of something today that I have already mentioned in this post:

Many thanks to the whole E7 crew: Dolan, Sean Gal, Sherlock, Kevin, Kel, I'm probably forgetting someone, and also anyone else that happened to share that spot in the space/time continuum: Gretechen, Nicole, Sue, all the chick's I've forgotten, doesn't make you any less important to this tale, just I smoked a lot of pot then, a known memory eraser.

Anyway: Thanks, without you guys, woul'da never known the joy of the 'NOC. Peace out.

Before I begin to ramble on about the boys in WNOC I should probably explain my view on the N word. Let me say up front I never use that word, as it is way too loaded with over five hundred years of slavery, oppression, torture and systematic abuse. See Wachovia Bank for details. Anyway I wasn’t in the band, just a fan of the music. Personally I don’t think they are or were racists, either, I think their motivations were more along the lines of Mark Twain’s who used that word in "Huckleberry Finn," by my recollection, at least twelve times on one page alone, describing Jim, but I think that was the whole point of Jim: he was the only genuinely good-hearted person in the entire book: thusly Twain was attempting to show that although you may call someone something, words can have little power over their life if they do not let them do so as such. Or at the very least, he was attempting to remove some of the the negative power of the word. Don't know. Not Sam Clemens.

Old Dirty Bastard of the Wu Tang Clan explained once on the Howard Stern Show that there is a difference between ----gers and ----gahs. Essentially, one is a lazy person, the other a homeboy. Personally, I’m pretty confused by the whole politically correct approach to these things, by that I mean, in the nineteen forties and fifties, they preferred “colored” because “negro” was to close to the other word. In the nineteen sixties and seventies, it became “black” – black power, black is beautiful, etc. Then in the nineteen eighties or nineties, it became “African American,” which, I think, is probably insulting to those who are: from Africa, but not of that particular color, are of mixed heritage, and those who are that color but came from somewhere else, i.e. the Caribbean.

The other thing I should explain is the blues. The blues evolved in the Mississippi Delta this way: slaves, whose only common tongue was that of their master’s, English, would sing, in iambic pentameter, their troubles to pass the days, to make their lives more bearable, to celebrate, to laugh, to cry. So you can take the last two lines of any act of any one of Shakespeare’s plays, sing them, and play the blues to them. Couplet iambic pentameter. Crazy but true. Anyway the blues begot jazz, rock and roll, reggae, funk and so on and so forth until hip hop rolled around in the late seventies. And, here we are now, they are all still going strong, entertain us.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t go for that politically correct bullshit to begin with, i.e. a executive once got fired after a public speaking engagement for using, in his speech, the word "niggardly," which is defined as: "excessively stingy." Go ahead, look it up. See? Told you so. I think perhaps there ought to be some kind of referendum amongst everyone so as to decide what exactly they would like to be known as / the rest of us should call them. Until that happens, I’m going with black, because, as a child of the seventies, I like that one best: Black is in fact beautiful. Black power is likely at least some, if not most of the time, a good thing.

At any rate, I think really we all ought to drop the whole labeling thing anyway, unfortunately, the day that happens, (pardon the clichés) hell will freeze over, pigs will fly, bombers flying shotgun in the sky will turn into butterflies over our nation, frogs will sing, and the Antichrist will appear. Besides, as I heard a comedian say on Sirius radio the other day, “there are so many better reasons to judge a person other than their skin color, it’s stupid. I think all people are born equal: then it is a slow but steady decline into [asssholedom.]”

Or adopt it whole-heartedly: I have no problem whatsoever if you want to refer to me as "some kind of Deigo/Deutch/Dutch/Mick bastard," or "one crazy 'Casian." I even have been known to answer to "hey, Asshole." Whatever.

So, the use of ---gahs by some people that are non-black is sometimes acceptable, not to me, but, I guess, if they are friends or whatever, it is o.k. Never has been for me, but that’s what some of them tell me. But if you are a performing artist of any color, whether you are Elvis Costello or Chuck D, and you use that word in your music, you ought to at least include an insert explaining the difference between the two words and when it is/is not appropriate for use, because, in general, and you can call me cynical all you want, most people are both stupid and ignorant. For in my experience, those non-black people who adopt the fashion and listen to the music are often the most racist people I’ve ever met. Not all, but more than a few. And I think WNOC did a disservice to both themselves and their fans (who were largely in their early to mid-twenties and white, forgive me, European Americans of Mixed Heritage, college students) by never doing that. Was at least one factor of three that I can think of that they were never signed to a major label. Thus: WNOC, White ---gahs On Crack. Anyway, like I said, I don’t think they were racist; I got to know them, as you will read, pretty well. And besides my opinion, there was one other that ought to count for something: the late, great jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr.’s.

I got to know Grover because he was a frequent customer of mine at where I bartended as his business office was across the street. Tuna sandwich on whole-wheat toast with lettuce and tomato and a bottle of Sam Adams, every time. Good guy, too: Annie, my boss, and I argued frequently over which jazz station I was allowed to play: Temple University’s (WRTI) that played the good, real jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, etc., or 106.1, the station with the modern, ‘mersh crap: Kenny G and so forth, even Grover. One day, Grover walks in while we are in the middle of that argument and says, “I want you to know, you are the only bartender here that plays decent music” That was the last time Annie said anything about it. Thanks Gro, see you up there. ‘NOC got to know Grover because Brownie, Chris Brown, the guitarist, did roadie work for him frequently, and anyway, the point is, Grover laid tracks for them on one song on their second release, “Devil.” Maybe he didn’t know what the acronym meant, I doubt it, though, and that guy was the first person I ever saw with an “Erascism” hat.

So can a white man feel the black man's pain? I don't know. I know I can feel empathy towards someone but that's not the same. Anyway, think what you will about me and/or the band. I don't give a shit. I can’t stand blind faith in anything, like when I was 10 and one of my mom’s cronies told me I shouldn’t be wearing a button with Buckwheat’s picture on it because, in her opinion, Buckwheat was somehow a racist portrayal, which is the same reason Bill Cosby bought the rights to all of them and will never show the Little Rascals again. Way to change history Bill: censor it. No, a-holes: it was a movie serial about the antics of a few kids in the Depression, that’s all. Entertainment. In hard times. The fact that the rest of the Rascals were all friends with Buckwheat should give you some clue as to the mindset of the producers of the Little Rascals. Freaking Big Brother Bill, like Fat Albert wasn’t chock full of stereotyping. Meanwhile Bill Cosby is cheating on his wife, slipping women Mickeys in order to take advantaged of them, telling Eddie Murphy to clean up his act, and telling blacks to learn to speak proper English, as if English isn’t a very malleable language, and in fact changes almost daily and ghetto-speak or whatever you want to call it hasn't already been absorbed by most mainstream culture. What a douche. Whatever. What I’m saying is, “liberals” are sometimes not at all liberal: they are as pigheaded, stupid, and blindly loyal to their side as anyone on the far right. Being liberal should mean, “being open to new ideas,” and many of them are, in fact, not at all open to anything.

So anyway, to the topic at hand: I saw WNOC first in early nineteen ninety-one, at this place Spelunker's near the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, and to paraphrase Rob Reiner in Spinal Tap, "don't look for it, it closed along time ago." I love that line, so self-serving, like anyone would. Anyway, they flat out sucked that night. Brownie told me later they all had had the flu, thus the overall suckiness of their performance. Flush full of the confidence that stemmed from my first and only fake I.D., I wound up getting so drunk on Jack Daniels and Heineken that I first went to puke in the bathroom, which turned out to be a broom closet. Being a gentleman, I don’t puke in broom closets, so I somehow managed to hold it in my cheeks, chipmonk like, while I found the bathroom, and did it in the sink. After washing out my mouth, I returned to the bar, and proceeded to promptly fall asleep on it. Next thing I remember is being escorted to the exit by a rather large, muscular and burly gentleman, who informed me to please not return for a while. Never did. Never drank Heiny and Jack again either.

The next time I saw them wasn’t until over a year later, had to have been mid-April nineteen ninety-two. My friend Nicole from La Salle University convinced me to go as she needed a ride, so I said, what the hell, let’s go to Penn’s Spring Fling and check it out. They totally rocked. I don't think I ever told Frank Holt this, but at one point I saved his entire effects pedal setup from a spilt beer. They also covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the end of which featured a very large headshot poster of Kurt Cobain being blown apart by fireworks, scant days after his unfortunate demise. Later I learned that at their first-ever live performance, at a place called JC Dobbs on South Street, where I once spoke with Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day at length about the album insert in for their first record, nice guy, by the way, at least before he got fat, 'NOC had collected hundreds of crack vials from the neighborhood where Brownie lived and threw them out to the audience as presents. My kind of jokers.

They were really a great live band. I don’t dance well, or often, but something about their music really grabbed me and made me do it. They were kind of like Sublime, with a little polka or whatever else thrown in, and happening at the same exact time, just with a vocalist, MC Cold 40, that rapped, sounding not entirely unlike Ernie from Sesame Street. If only Ernie could say things like “I’m not here to cut the rug / or dis any biddies / I rather kiss and hug / than piss on their titties / Don’t get me wrong, dating’s allowed / but not with the ones who call me when I’m rockin’ the crowd / I share my life and sacrifice but when we turn the light out / please receive me dear uh huh call me MC White Out” (‘Biddies (Be Dissin’ Me’)) or “Sing a song a sister’s got a pocket full of crack / you think you’re saying something but you ain’t sayin’ jack / tell me what is going on these days / from what I seen lately motherfuckin’ crime pays / cause somebody is getting paid” (‘Getting’ Paid’) and so on and so forth.

The live shows were simply the best. Really I’d say that, over a span of six years, I probably saw them play nearly three hundred times, easy. I mean, virtually every time they played, I went, it was that good. Always fun. And in addition to the frequent present-throwing, which made great schwag, I witnessed and/or participated in the following: dwarf tossing, tossing presents offstage at the Christmas show while Schooly D DJ'd, strippers stripping fully nude, marijuana smoking inside clubs (every time they played ‘Kind Bud,’ actually), psilocybin use, Sean Gal taking out the drum kit as he was tripping on ‘shrooms while simultaneously attempting to sing his part on ‘Biddies’ one time at the Barbary, blowing antagonistic smoke at the back of the bouncer's head at the Halloween show while dressed in a cow costume and wearing a Jason hockey mask, my "Mad Cow" outfit that only Joe MC40 got later that night as he was about to go to bed at four a.m. and probably because he used the same mask on stage, how star-effing of me, and a whole shitload of public drunkenness. Really. A lot. More than you can imagine, even, as Han Solo once said, if you can imagine quite a bit. My “seat,” as it was, at these shows was generally to stand front row, center, for as long as I could take the heat, and dance my ass off and sweat like crazy. Then hit the bar for a shot and a beer. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Apparently at one Halloween show, when they had WNOC carved each letter into four jack o' lanterns, I very nearly got my head kick in for taking that position, but hey, sacrifices must made if you want to properly enjoy a show, and anyway I'll take one for the team anytime.

Another time, there was supposed to be some kind of an ‘artist showcase’ at the Trocodero where featured artists were supposed to play for a few different labels' A&R guys. Of course maybe 7 people show up, and not one A&R guy. Call it Bones’ Inverse Law of Trying to Get Signed: play a club designed to hold 75 people and 200 show up: play a club that can hold well over a thousand, invite the record companies, and virtually no one shows up. So this band Mercy River is playing, and the jackass lead singer/guitarist says something like ‘How come no one is dancing? You guys suck.’ Dude, there’s twelve people here, and four of them are on stage and two are behind the bar. Not a lot of dancing is gonna go on. So Meats and I, wise-asses that we are, form a two person mosh pit for their entire next song, which was pretty long, four or five minutes at least, dancing in the most absurd fashions possible: foxtrot, robot, Charleston, whatever, every once in a while knocking each other onto the floor. At least the guy apologized after that tune, like, ‘Sorry I guess I shouldn’t have said that.’ Duh, no asshole, not to me, not in Philly. The one time I missed what turned out to be a good show was when ‘NOC opened for U2 in Hershey, PA. Another factor in career-killing (which I’ll get to later): the instructions were: whatever you guys do, don’t go onto Bono’s catwalk, which extended twenty yards or so into the crowd (especially Achtung-Baby-Tour-Bono, he's cool again now, but he acted like a total jackass that tour, I saw him singing to himself into a mirror at the Wachovia Center, no shit, and he wouldn't shake my hand when he got close as I was standing next to his precious self-serving catwalk. Divorce: it does a body no good.). So, of course, 40 had to leap the ten-foot gap the stage crew had left in the catwalk, blow-up doll in hand, and proceed to simul-fuck her. Now that’s commitment to a joke. And suicide for a band. Anyway, there's many, many more details than those, but thems the ones I 'member. For now.

I got to become friends with them, at least sort of. Brownie worked the door at Walsh’s Tavern (don’t look for that one either, it’s gone too), this bar in West Philly, where, every Monday night, and the Tuesday nights, this band Crosstown Traffic played. For me it was like getting a weekly guitar lesson. Rob Holt would come for the same reason but drums. Three guys that were Philly studio musicians, Greg, Wally and shit, I can’t remember the drummer’s name, but he wound up playing in June Rich, which effectively ended Crosstown Traffic. Can’t blame him though. Anyway I'd hang out, listen to music, and play whatever video game was next to the door and Brownie and I would talk about whatever, Eagles, Flyers, Philles, Sixers, music, whatever. I'd like to say I remember verbatim more of the conversations, but given the setting, that didn't happen. Oh well. Can't remember all the bullshit I suppose.

I got to know all of them a little bit anyway. Actually, if I were working that night, I would bring two Schmitters (Frank Holt (bass) and Brownie (guitar) one Dickens (Rob Holt (drums)) and a G.B.S. (Joe (Roastin' and Toastin')) for them to eat at the mid show break. That worked out, 'cause they usually didn’t go on 'til after 11 or so, and I was always out of work by midnight, and most of the places they played were within a half hour drive, so I’d catch a good portion of the show, then go home and crash, and be back to work fresh as a still-drunken daisy by 9 a.m..

The worst time, though, was this: I had this dog, Rudie, she was great. But you had to be careful with her. She didn’t bite on purpose, but if you were trying to wrestle the stick or ball or toy or whatever out of her mouth in order to throw it again (she never mastered the whole ‘drop’ command, but hey, that’s half the reason I named her Rudie: the Rude Dog, rude, stubborn and disobedient. Other half was "Rudie Can't Fail" by the Clash), she would quick-snap at another point on the stick to get leverage. So one time I went to see them play down at the Art Museum area, and anyway I took Rudie as it was a nice day and I could walk her down Kelly Drive. Turns out the band went on a lot earlier than I expected, but I ran into Rob and his girlfriend at the time, Natalie on Kelly Drive. So anyway, I’m talking to them, Rob starts messing with Rudie, trying to get the stick out, I say, ‘wait, not a good idea’ as I know what’s about to happen, which was, she adjusted her grip and bit right through his thumbnail, bad news for a drummer. He was cool about it, like, ‘you told me so,’ but Natalie was this sort of hot, but not hot enough to be the kind of a power bitch she was kind of girl, and, anyway and I never liked her all that much to begin with. Personality disorder of none whatsoever. Anyway, every time I saw him at Walsh’s after that, until the scar that developed on nail grew all the way out, I’d buy him a couple rounds at least---he never asked for that, I just did it out of guilt, and in fact eventually he started refusing--but it still beats the hell out of the hassle and pain of a lawsuit and a dog extermination. Good guy.

They were never signed. Personally, and this is only my opinion, I think there were a few factors:

#1 I think they didn’t write enough new material. Two albums in ten years (excluding the annual Christmas tape) is simply not enough and songwriting is like any writing, the more you do it the better you get at it. I mean they changed and improved and different versions of all of their stuff, and the lyrics were almost never the same, Joe would just go into a zone and make stuff up freestyle, but still. Just not enough new shit, in my very humble opinion.

#2 They were trying to get signed. They really wanted that, especially Rob, and I don’t think as an artist you should ever concentrate on any award or achievement or whatever. It will only cloud your thinking and ultimately you will compromise your art. Self-censorship is absolutely the worst kind.

#3 would be the name. No major record company is going to risk throwing that out there, unfortunately.

#4 May have been MC40. He was a pretty good rapper, but when compared to Sublime, and their music really was very similar, but there was a difference. Plus Brad from Sublime overdosed, and everyone knows death is a career move in the music industry, and nobody in that band died, fortunately or not. And 40's freestyle raps were so goddman dirty, they were great: I have this one live version of "Gettin' Paid" that he gave me, a line in it goes: "To all the ladies that look fine / pretend my prick is Moby Dick / have a whale of a time / though I'm not a deep sea diver / I just love when my cock / is covered in saliva / into pussy lickin' know what I mean G? / when it comes to eatin' cat / I'm the Chicken of the Sea." Fucking brilliant. Don't get me wrong though: I mean not to say 40 was any worse or, for that matter, better than Brad, they each had their own attributes, they are/were their own men. Just that Brad, by record sales alone, was the better vocalist: he could sing sweetly like Bob Marley, and I never heard 40 do that. Not that he can't, I just never heard it.

But, who knows, really; I suppose they were never signed because it just wasn't in the cards is all.

So, I guess they broke up some time in 1999. I actually missed the last couple-few shows as I was working in upstate New York for about six months at the time, bummer, but I got to see them plenty anyway. I do sometimes wonder: if I get married, which likely won't happen, would they play my wedding? Maybe not, but, every band has their price…..