I wrote this song for a Food Not Bombs compilation to benefit the Dineh (Navaho) Save Big Mountain movement.  We played benefits for Ward Valley, too.  My great (I don’t know how many times) grandfather was a Cherokee chief on the Trail of Tears.  I own a fringe shirt made out of an American flag cut and sewn during the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.  Smoke on that peace pipe, my cracker friends!

What a horrible year.  It began with the death of two of my friends.  Next was a virus that floored me for ten weeks.  Then an abortion.  I didn’t feel strong enough to attempt our national tour with Free Verse, the all girl Lawrence, Kansas hardcore band I had signed to my new label Brain Floss Records.  But I did it anyway.  Erin caught a cold right off and of course I got it.  I spent most of the tour sick in the back seat of the van. 

At the end of the tour Ronnie and I had to drive the minivan full of drums and amps from Vermont to Seattle.  We found ourselves in South Dakota on the Fourth of July.  In the morning I followed a trail of dandelions to a museum. 

While I wandered, the great granddaughter of Chief Red Cloud quietly wove a quill bracelet while conversing with Ronnie, then gave it to him along with a standing invitation to visit the reservation. 

That afternoon we visited Bear Butte where Chief Crazy Horse loved to meditate and pray.  We hadn’t realized there would be Sioux there, duh.  We were the only whiteys but no one bothered about us.  We climbed onto the butte and watched a thunderstorm play across the plains.  I left some of my hair as a prayer flag; and collected sage that fell out of a medicine man’s basket as I walked the path behind him.

That night we drove the freeway in the thunderstorm.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  Two thunderstorms were approaching each other and the lightning was flashing in vivid hues of blue and red.  It looked like we were driving right into the impact where the storms would meet but the freeway veered a little south. 

We slowed down in the pouring rain to watch the two storms collide on rolling grassy hills lit up green in the bright flashes.  Then I saw the sign.  The storms had met on the Little Big Horn.  It still gives me chills.

Was I singing to riot grrrl or to Debbie or to anonymous snipers on message boards?  I was singing to them all and to others including my family.      

Speaking of Chainsaw one of the first shows we played on our national tour was in Olympia at the Capitol Theater.  We tried to play with Witchy Poo whenever we were up there because Slim Moon would always think of something unexpected to do and seemed to appreciate it when we were the only ones laughing.

After we arrived during sound check my Stratocaster died.  I didn’t know it had active pick ups that needed batteries.  When we figured it out Ronnie pulled all the strings off it, handed it to me, and just before running down the street to buy some nine volts asked me to take the screws out. 

I wasn’t really sure what screws he meant.  So in the nervous tension of the beginning of the tour I sat at dusk in the parking lot and removed every single goddamn screw from that guitar! 

When Ronnie came back he was as helpless as I was in front of the disconnected mess.  (Did I do something bad?)  I’ll never forget the voice of Chainsaw Records honcho Donna Dresch asking us what was up.  Donna had that guitar back together so fast it was like she waved a magic wand over it! 

Even though I understood why Debbie left and I wanted her to be safe, some uncontrollable and primitive part of me felt betrayed.  She was someone I had looked up to.  One of my best friends had vanished completely from my life. 

Near the end, she would lapse into long silences.  A few times she simply stopped playing and sat with her head hung.  The drives home were excruciating and I dreaded the silence.

I never really became friends with Erin.  We all understood she was a temp and we all knew it dragged out too long.  But I really enjoyed hanging out with Erin and friends of hers like Ashley. 

Ashley was quiet; and very stylish in a Fifties or perhaps Forties way.  She would sit with her back on Erin’s kick drum at our shows so the drum wouldn’t move.  Fearlessly she stared down the audience: sometimes melancholy with unspoken knowledge, sometimes glaring as if to emphasize the message of an angry song.  Her rare smile would charm.

I don’t know if Ashley and I ever talked for more than a couple minutes.  I remember us all sitting quietly on the grass before a gig at The Library.  The silence was so comfortable.   

This song is Ronnie’s portrait of a certain type of parasite we encountered in every scene we played: riot grrrl, peace punk, hemp rallies, you could usually count on one of these creepss handling some illegal niche, pun intended. 

On our first national tour when we swung through L.A. a creep like that picked on me not realizing I was in the band.  I called him out from the stage.  It turned out he had tried to rape girls he offered rides home.

Some of Erin’s lyrics are about her friendship with Joey Karam (long before he joined The Locust).  Back then Joey was at KUCI radio and he promoted great shows.  Thanks to him we got to open for bands like Jejune and Joan of Arc.

But these songs also capture Erin’s disillusionment with riot grrrl.  What do you expect when you throw a bunch of abuse survivors in a scene together and tell them to do what they want?  Abuse in/abuse out, it’s that simple, and a supposedly safe space is the perfect place for acting out. 

Know anybody so smart they never do anything?  They can give you a hundred reasons why anything anyone could do is hopeless, ridiculous, senseless, or dangerous.  I was wrestling with the idea that there was no future for me making music.  The one thing I didn’t want to do is see any more of my life go down the drain. 

Erin liked this song from The Stillness of Over so much she insisted we record it with her.  Ronnie tweaked the lyrics and arrangement a little.  I like his new line: “fuck you for enjoying falling on us who haven’t given up yet.”  The line “should I masturbate or mutilate?” was my contribution.  I’ve always admired him for having the balls to sing that cuz I never would. 

Playing this song in front of riot grrrls I thought it was about adolescent rebellion and the healthy human drive to criticize and transcend an oppressive status quo.  But now with Black Panthers at our shows I could see the song from the point of view of racism.  “I never was what you made me” took on a whole new meaning.

You see, the Panthers had marched into Koo’s one matinee.  OC punks confronted OG Panthers.  Sharrif Abdullah, who had been the minister of defense for the Panthers since the late Seventies, stood in front of the crowd and asked anyone who believed the Panthers were pro-violence and anti-white to raise a hand.  No hands were raised. 

Sharrif was a bit pissed off by this.  He took the time to look every one of us right in the eyes.  I watched the expression on his face change as he realized we had not snidely lied or chickened out.  “I want to thank you for giving me an experience that is one of the highlights of my life as a revolutionary,” he quietly said with a smile. 

Man, was I proud sporting my gang truce t-shirt hot off the Panther silkscreen!  You see, though I’m a blond cracker by appearance, I have the occasional nappy hair to prove that Victoria Spivey was a distant relation. 

Victoria was a black blues singer and the first woman to own an independent record label.  She was an old woman when she became one of the earliest to record Bob Dylan.  I knew nothing about her until I had several CDs to my credit, but listening to her gruff blues shout and salty lyrics I felt like I was coming home to the arms of the mother I never knew!

The Panthers gave The Stillness of Over a positive review in their newspaper.  The leader of the New African Vanguard contributed to a zine Sisi of Revolution Rising, Ronnie, and I were doing called Eracism.  The Panthers helped make thousands of copies which were distributed to gang truce centers and prisons all over the western United States.

My friend and drummer Debbie gone, Erin shaky at best, no new drummer on the horizon, I contemplated the unsavory prospect of continuing my career as a musician.  The song lapses into silence after the repeated scream: “Why should I trust you or me?”  I was a few weeks from bedridden sick and feeling weaker by the day. 

People had been fucking with me going all the way back to mom.  Could I ever heal the damage?  Or would I keep repeating with my band the abandonment I first experienced with my family?  A few months later, Erin dumped us near the end of our national tour. 

Thurston Moore called us “smokin’ but we learned that without the certification of the right label and publicist, invisibility constantly threatens. In fact, a few years later when our Tacoma Ballet CD hit #1 on national college radio no one knew because we didn’t hire a publicist. How could we? We didn’t know about it ourselves until months later!

Riot grrrl had been hip and it was easy for us to get write ups but peace punk was not and what little media attention we had was gone. In the back of my mind when I wrote this song were thoughts of all the people who had said they were friends, the writers who had praised me, the DJs who had played me, they were all gone.

Later I got a letter from a girl who told me the song saved her life when she was feeling suicidal after being dumped. Since then I’ve gotten other letters like that, they are a big reason why I keep making music.

I think this is my best guitar solo; it’s actually three combined solos, check out the Hammond organ-like overtones I got!

“What could be more innocent than thirsting for innocence?”
“Does your windshield make a TV out of everything you see?”
“Are you all safe and warm in your emotional aquarium?”
“How do you have the demons removed other people forced on you?”
Those four questions tell a story that is quite chilling.

To end it Ronnie skids out in a lyrical ramble about a switch he wants to flip to change the world back (accompanied by a blatantly psychedelic blend of guitar destruction and acoustic pickery).

Near the end of our national tour Erin left Lucid Nation. Our last show together was at The Black Cat in Washington D.C. on Father’s Day, a show that culminated when Erin and Free Verse confronted Ronnie for not moving enough of the gear (even though he was road managing the whole tour).

I was pissed that Erin decided to fly home the next day, sure, but I understood. All I had to do was think back to the night we opened for Hazel at the Showcase Theater a couple years earlier. Erin had to sneak out her window to play drums at the gig; she was sixteen years old and grounded. Her tour of duty with us was epic for a kid who had just turned eighteen when it ended.

Erin’s girl power anthem inspired me to try drumming.  Unfortunately I could never get both arms working so I had to do an unintentional Tommy Lee pointing thing with my left stick!  

We left Erin at the hotel next to the airport in Jersey and drove through the tunnel into New York City on our way to our meeting with Tia Sprocket, then playing with Luscious Jackson.  We were on the threshold of a third new world for Lucid Nation to explore.