Here is a post from nightonearth.blogspot.com about the best times in my life so far. Thanks to Michael R. Hawkins for finally telling this story. I will cut and paste it here to save you a link, but visit his blog soon.
After my first band, Every Waking Moment, shit the bed because three-fourths of us came to the realization that our drummer was a psychotic, my good friend and EWM bassist Matt and I struck off on our own and started anew. We threw off the reins of bad, early 2000’s metalcore and Converge noise-worship and decided to just simplify things: we started a punk rock band. It was a struggle at first as neither of us had ever written a listenable song, but over the years we’d pounded enough Kid Dynamite, Gorilla Biscuits, and Lifetime into our fevered, little brains so that one day - maybe, if we were lucky - we’d be able to do just that. We thumbed through a slew of bad names before settling upon the worst one we could think of: Total Recall. Perfect. We asked our consummate friend and slapstick foil Bro Tom to handle the second guitar (I, myself, took the first), then we found Justin to take over the drums, and Shane to hold down the bass. Shane - best friend of mine that he is - couldn’t handle Tom and Justin’s constant, anti-PC lingo and he quickly bowed out. Derrick came on board last and with Matt already in the position of vocalist, it was almost as if you could hear the click the pieces made as we came together. In essence, to quote the RZA, we formed like Voltron.
Total Recall was not a band. Well, maybe to the people who watched us play and witnessed our onstage shenanigans, we were just a band. But to me and to some of my best friends and former bandmates, Total Recall was an era. Yes, to the few of us lucky enough to have ridden that fabled punk rock beast of old in the dim twilight of days gone by, Total Recall was everything we wanted it to be and more. There were two reasons for this. One was the Sixth Street House and the other was the aforementioned Derrick James.
The Sixth Street House was a foul dump of a punk rock palace in the middle of Holly Hill, Florida: the place where dignity goes to die. And then to be deep-fried. All the eventually permanent members of Total Recall lived there at one point or another, sans Justin, our drummer (I myself managed to stay for a whopping two weeks) and it served as the backdrop for a summer full of shady antics and uprorious ridiculousness. The house was our home base and most of the inspiration behind Total Recall’s particularly unorginal brand of punk rock. Even those of us who didn’t live there could usually be found there, sometimes driving canned food into the backyard with stolen golfclubs, other times throwing footballs at passing cars from the roof, and at other times dominating Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 beneath the watchful gaze of a wall covered in Bad Boys II posters. More often than not, the five of us, along with the rest of our motley crew, would be piled into Matt’s minivan, en route to a show, regardless of whether we were playing or not. The house was a place unlike any other, in an unparalleled time in my life where the outside world of adult responsibility had completely ceased to matter.
If the Sixth Street House was the vessel that carried forth this hedonistic ideal, Derrick James was the living, breathing embodiment of it. He was beast of a kid, most likely a barbarian in some former life. I once saw him wrench the hood right off his car and throw it a good fifteen feet. He had cinder blocks for hands and a refrigerator for a torso. It’s true. The first conversation I ever had with him involved his fervent wish and desire to have an adamantium-lined gullet and an unhingeable jaw so that he would never have to quarrel with anyone over the ownership of any particular piece of property. He could just eat it and shit it out later. Problem solved, argument over.
Derrick was the de facto leader of the Sixth Street House, the don of our scruffy, little family. He lived his life like he was a viking, anotherwords he did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. And what he wanted usually involved fire and brute strength. So when he replaced Shane in Total Recall, I knew we were in for some wild times. He didn’t so much take over playing the bass. He just forced his instrument to play our songs while he scanned the crowd for people to hammer punch in the throat.
It’s hard to seperate the events that transpired while we were all in Total Recall, from the actual band-related stuff. I mean, basically, we tried to sound a lot like Kid Dynamite, we recorded six songs (seven if you count Derrick’s solo hidden track contribution, under the guise of his alter ego Tractor Man), dubbed our demo any number of things that corresponded to the acronym SDC (Sketchy Dude Crew, was but one), and we had shirts with Kurt Russell printed on them. And sure, we played some shows. But the band was really only an extension of the house, a personalized soundtrack to our hooligan activity.
There were a few times we deigned it necessary to leave the Sixth Street punk rock crash pad in pursuit of furthering our musical agenda. You couldn’t necessarily call these little sojourns tours (although we did) - they were more like roadtrips. Mostly we went to Virginia Beach and Richmond and once we went to Atlanta. The shows were terrible, but I’ve never had more fun (or complained less) than I did on those trips. We’d always leave around midnight in order to squeeze every last bit of sleep-deprived craziness that we could out of each trip. The sheer amount of inside jokes and hilarious, sometimes surreal events that were birthed on that 700 mile stretch of I-95 will forever shape my sense of humor and the way that I look at the world. A few years later I started a band called Years From Now and named one of our songs after something Derrick confided to me in the watches of one of those “tour” nights, the van pointed south towards Daytona and home. He told me that sometimes he dreamt of a massive conveyor belt. And on that conveyor belt were thousands of skulls, sliding inexorably forward to be pulverized into dust by a gigantic, robotic hammer. To this day, I’m not exactly sure what it means, but I feel that this admission was the tip of a dark iceberg, a premonition if you will, that would eventually signal the end of our days spent in our punk rock Neverland.
We’d always return home a few days later, feeling as if we had been carried back on the wingspan of a triumphant, golden eagle, with a bear trap for a beak and talons made of samurai swords. Our proverbial coffers would be overflowing with ill-gotten plunder thanks largely in part to Derrick, Matt, and Shawn’s uncanny ability to steal anything. Shawn was our everpresent mutual friend and “roadie” who wouldn’t do anything unless it involved sarcasm. The minute we piled out into the yard of the House, it was back to throwing machetes at the trees in the backyard, poolhopping in the middle of the night while emasculating hotel security guards, and breaking boards over Tom’s back and head. I think Derrick single-handedly knocked out about four people that summer. He also managed to break up a family with one of those punches, setting into motion a series of events that literally resulted in divorce. It wasn’t that everything transpiring during that brief period of time was good, or even halfway intelligent. It was just happening and before long, it began to feel like those things were hurtling towards some inevitable conclusion. So we tried to pack as much craziness into our lives as we possibly could before order reasserted itself. We were going to burn the mother as brightly as it would burn, before it finally burned out forever.
The beginning of the end descended upon us when Matt and Tom brought home a matched pair of succubi. I shan’t repeat said trollops’ names here for fear of invoking grisly reprisals from the doomy netherworld. Just imagine how you felt when you were a kid and one of your dopey Alfalfa-minded mates would bring his beloved back to the boys’ clubhouse and just ruin everything. Well, that’s what happened at the Sixth Street House. These two Gorgons turned our house into a prison and our friends and bandmates into dried-out husks of the proud men that they once were, eventually drained of all the lifeforce and happiness which the House had caused to blossom within them. Derrick laid plans to behead them and burn their rattlesnake bodies, but before he became our own personal Perseus, our landlord suddenly realized that none of our names were on the lease. In fact, the former residents (a closeted lesbian cat lady and a few other assorted weirdos) had run screaming from the premises when Derrick and Matt showed up one night and decided they wanted rooms. Ownership had never been legally transferred, hence all of us were soon to be out on our collective asses. No matter that most of us didn’t even live there. It was our house. Eviction from the Sixth Street House signalled the end of an era.
It also signalled the end of Total Recall.
After a particularly vicious browbeating at the hands of his demonseed of a girlfriend, Matt briefly lost his marbles and took off for Richmond, Virginia leaving us down one best friend and vocalist. We tried valiantly to soldier onward, moving Bro Tom over to vocals and asking Sixth Street House regular Josh to take over second guitar. I even booked us a tour up to New York and back. We got to South Carolina, slept in a movie theater, played one show, realized we hadn’t the heart to continue, nor the funds, and dragged ourselves home. This time our return journey didn’t feel so much like being borne aloft on the back of a golden eagle, but more like we were staked to the underbelly of some slimy, amphibious monstrosity, as it flopped through a dark and diseased swamp feeding on other animals’ droppings. Tom tried to empty a cup of chewed sunflower shells out of the passenger side of the van on that trip, resulting in the cruel winds of destiny blowing them back into the van and all over my unsuspecting face. Even though I was covered in half-chewed sunflower seed chaff and spittings, I smiled a bittersweet smile, amused at how good a metaphor the event was for how low my spirits had sunk.
We knew it was over. The dream was dead.
We called it quits soon after that. I’m not even positive that we played a final show. Total Recall winked out of existence without so much as a sigh of disapproval. We left behind our six recorded songs and a lot of tee-shirts with washed-off graphics because of our choice in cheap inks.
Eventually, we moved on. Matt got married and made a life for himself in Richmond. I started a few other bands and even lived in Richmond with Matt for a short time myself where I met my soon-to-be-fiancee. A string of bad luck hit Derrick and he wound up incarcerated. He gets out in the summer of 2011 and I’m looking forward to seeing him. Tom had a baby and moved to Hawaii for a while. Justin was in one of my other bands with me. He grew a massive beard and then shaved it off to become a parking valet at the Hilton.
The house is still there, only whoever lives in it now finally mowed the yard, replaced the planks in the fence that Derrick punched out, covered up our profane graffitti on the backyard shed, gave back the bases that we stole for our own personal whiffleball field, and took the folding chairs off the roof. I don’t even want to think about what changes have happened to the inside of the place. No doubt the Bad Boys II wallpaper went out with the trash, as did the couch with the custom phalluses carved into the arms, and the soda can sculpture that was guarded like a work of precious art.
I feel a sharp pang of something like grief whenever I find myself on Sixth Street passing by the House. Remembering all of its former glory is something I tend to do quite often, if only because it marks a time in my life that I can never return to.
Well, I guess you can’t dwell on the past forever. As Derrick would say, “Fuck you, you fucking crybaby faggot.”
And those, my friends, are words to live by.
Total Recall - Seriously Donkey Corn
