...bad paradise...
...the ballad of footeastman [part two]...
“Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.”
-Laurie Anderson-
Ever since I was a young boy I wanted to play in a band. Specifically any band that would let me wear makeup and spandex and have long moussey hair. I grew up in the age of thrash and hair metal, reading all the unauthorized rock and roll comix I could get my hands on, and fantasizing about being covered in smoke while I shrieked terribly obvious euphemisms for sex, while doiffed in a ripped tiger print leotard. My mom took me to a local county fair and I told her this fantasy, so she bought me a generic metal trucker cap that said “cool” in neon lettering as a way to encourage in me extremely early onset balding.
I shaved my head within two weeks.
During that era I imagined the bands I might be in when I grew up. To be in a good hair metal band you needed to have one of a few things. Either three syllables, two words, maybe an animal name and some kind of a mis-spelling or funky letter. Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Ratt, Motley Crüe, Van Halen, Bon Jovi or Kenny G all come to mind as examples.
I would draw the bands I wanted to play in on my blue lined white notebook paper. WhyteFoxx with the last X featuring a bushy tail that snaked back under the logo. DinnerSore, a gore core dinosaur costume band (that played restaurants ala The Rock-A-Fire Explosion). ScudMcPumpkenstein would be my one man fifty bass funk tribute to Bootsy Collins.
After years of pretending on paper, I moved on to pretending on stage (technically on the floors of squatted warehouses and derelict two story victorians). But the band names I started with forgot about the rules I had deployed as a child daydreaming.
I played upside down guitar in Chap Chips & The Dick Floppers, a band that should have been named Haüt Draügen instead. I played keyboards in Suffacomoticuss (the band that suffocates), which would have been better off being named Spit Pistol. I sang in Hurt Beavers which should have been named Hürt Beavers with an umlaüt. I moved between all sorts of projects, none named to match the precise alchemic mix of simple + stupid that my childish brain had envisioned for me.
It wasn’t until I started a band called Bad Paradise that I had finally landed inside of a band name fit for a ten year old id. Sure it lacked an animal or an umlaüt, but it captured inside of it the spirit of a neon tiger bandana dipped in booze and lit on fire. The band had been called Bad Paradise because of a rum drink I once made with tiny bananas and cherries. A dancer and a sailer I know approved of the drink name, and we immediately started making music in the aftermath.
(the above is not our band)
BAD PARADISE [recipe]
Glass of ice
2 shots rum
1 shot lime
7 up
Dash of orange juice
Dash of the good pomegranate grenadine
Drape two cherries over the baby banana halfway peeled hanging off the glass
Sprinkle cacao nibs
Splash bitters
Bad Paradise was an electro band. A dance band. And after a few months it was no band at all. An ok band name didn’t shield us from the ravages of sustaining a lasting relationship. Turns out a band made out of a drink made from cheap produce doesn’t have a long term shelf life.
Immediately after our paradisian partnership ended, I did what all the aspiring confused do, and sought out a friend to throw a rave with. Given I had never been to a rave before I figured the best way to attend one would be to put one on. I sent myself an invite and confirmed with myself just to be certain. I would be there.
Online 40,000 people had said they were going to attend so we got the maximum allowable amount of locally available disco balls and lasers at the west oakland dollar general (half a pack of 12 balloons). I put on a gorilla costume and a torn apart Cher wig and draped myself with glow bracelets and sparkle face paint. I was ready to rave.
The doors opened and we watched as slowly a handful of people trickled in, and then another handful, and then finally the final handful. It turns out that online yes people can be real life no people. All told we probably had around half a hundred weirdos at the event and half a dozen smoke machines to accommodate them. The warehouse would feel increasingly like a volcano’s anus as the night strobed on.
Amongst the proctol smoke I noticed a bedazzling long legged lady across the rave from me. Dressed in a sparkling black nightgown, and etch-a-sketching throughout the silty grey landscape she lit up my brain closet in the spot I hid nudie magazines and mushrooms in. My first thoughts were “woah, dude.” and then “hello, is it me you’re looking for?”. I wanted to race my teeth across her shoes and take her pictures to put on a billboard to sell cereal.
I imagine a rave is a place where people mystery crush on each other. The ability to get lost in the moment is an opportunity to get lost in any other moment even if just for a moment. I lost myself in several moments at that moment. I imagined this beauty Tawny Kitaening all over some hot rod I’d never own while we were both sprayed on from a firehose wielded by a sharply dressed chimpanzee in a hot yellow blazer. I dreamt we had a date on a hot air balloon where I revealed to her we both had pigeon wings. We would fly away and set the balloon free to go to some balloon island called Baloonigans where it would do balloon stuff like squeak, float and slowly bleed air.
Amidst all this daydreaming I remembered I had a set-up to set-up Even though we had broken up, Bad Paradise was alive and ready to roast.
We opened our show with a song about ogling an aerobics class through a window, kicking and bending to each beat like a Jane Fonda fondling fair. The guitar playing sailor emerged out of the smoke in a bear suit and plugged in a guitar. We were about to band reunion ourselves like the 40th version of Lynyrd Skynyrd showing up to a county farm festival.
With the bloated energy of old men with PBR blood and barely there beards, we unveiled a 20 minute version of a song about a wizard who also runs an electronics store in his tower. We felt like how I think Peter Jackson felt when he decided to make The Hobbit into three ninety-nine hour movies. The crowd was ambivalent to the success of our reunification. Sensing the onset of their ecstasy excursioned ecstatic curiositic boredom we moved into our finale, an opus about one of the world’s greatest sodas, Champagne.
(the above is probably our band)
Champagne is a song about champagne. About drinkling it, dancling with it, doodling and diddling with it. I unveiled two $5 bottles of corner store Cooks and with little thought other than “if we are balloon pigeons…let’s dance”, I gave the mic and champagne bottle to the 1000 foot woman in the sparkling black nightgown. I introduced her as Champagne, and said she was here to share her drink and song with everyone. She nodded and obliged either aware of my avionistic fantasy, or at least game to see what gyrating with a gorilla Cher might feel like (furry/hairy).
She stamped. We spun. The crowd cheered and chewed cheap sour juice from the green glass lips of the bottle. And then it was done.
The smoke cleared. The song and dance ended, and with it the rave and the moment. I set about pulling plugs, sweeping the floor and silencing the volcanic fogholing of the warehouse and slowly stacked gear into my scraped white subaru.
Is it divine intervention to meet a woman named Champagne while singing a song about it? Even if you gave her that name and wrote the song? I barely had time to consider such cosmos when Champagne walked from the corner of the street and came to my side saying, “Hey bud, your little game cost me a tooth” pointing to a small chip on the front of her top front teeth the booze bottle had broken. “Apologies madam” I said in my mind. “Aw fuck I’m sorry” I said in my mouth. “Anything I can do to fix that for you?”. She laughed, said no and asked if any of us were going to the city.
With my car fully stuffed with odd objects I had no ride to offer, so I offered her a ride to my house anyhow. I would strap her to the top of the car if she had interest, or let her strap me there and ride us both home. If this sounds like some dirty automotive S&M fantasy, know that it is, and that my safe word is vroom-vroom.
Champagne, the lady that she was, laughed off my accelerated advances (pun!). She knew better than to trust the promise of an Oakland warehouse couch sleep promised from a sweaty man avataring in dark gorilla Cher. In awe of her beauty I would have done anything to steal a kiss that eve, but the time was not now. My mind flared vision of some future connection.
I would be on my own that evening.
Rather than gift me a night of grunty growling and baby banana foreplay, Champagne presented me instead a joke and her e-mail address. The joke she told me was long. One of those jokes made to make you barely follow along until you are so deep into the story that the eventual punchline strikes as a surprise. I forget the particulars of the joke beyond that it involved a harpist playing inside of a disco owned by a man named Sam Frank. His harp playing at the disco causes everyone to fall in love and brings peace to the town. But when he leaves the disco the night goes downhill, everything goes to pot, and at some point someone asks him if he can play his harp again and save the night.
But he can’t, because he left his harp in Sam Frank’s disco.
The right band name can open any of many a new door. Also The Doors would have a better band name if they were just called The Door. I’m not sure if this is a universal rule or not but The Beatle is definitely a superior band name to The Beatles. I can’t decide if I prefer The Who or The Whos, but I am certain that Oasisis is much more wonderwallerful than Oasis and that Creed is best pronounced silently or not at all. And for the sake of being unpopular let’s just say I prefer Taylor’s Swifts because it is difficult to pronounce and sounds like a garage rock band who couldn’t quite make it onto the Ed Sullivan show. Bad Paradises would not be a better name than Bad Paradise. Bad’s Paradise has promise, but it sounds more like a long stringy joke.
Champagne in our brief moment of meet, had inspired me to want more Champagne, which oddly is not known as Champagnes. And just like the plural of shark is shark, so too was this fabulous phenom singular (and hopefully single). I had spent most of my life in singularity, CansaFis, not CansaFisisis. But something about meeting this funny lady had me curious about exploring a new plurality. I made it home and stared at the e-mail address pulled from my pocket. I then took out my browser and started immediately started searching for photos of Alf(s).
I was on my way to paradise.
You're keeping us on our toes!! Excited to follow your love story to the beat (pun intended)
Aw shucks - glad Champagne was pronounced (and pronounceable) and didn't fall into the realm of "best pronounced silently or not at all" (like Creed).